


Ghosts of the Borderland

by Umbralpilot



Category: Original Work
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Earth Magic, Gen, Historical Fantasy, Loyalty, Magic-Users, Monster on a Leash, Moral Dilemmas, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Soul Bond, Power Dynamics, Sick Character, Soldiers, Wilderness Survival, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-10-27 18:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17771978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: In the midst of political crisis, Amika Stattenholme - once sheltered noblewoman, now leader of her country's Guardians - must journey across a frozen mountain pass to find answers that may prevent, or lead to war. Her only companion on this journey is Saul Samaren: peerless warrior, brutal mercenary and former enemy, whose loyalty she has never truly tested.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted as a work in progress in Fail_Fandomanon. With great thanks to all the nonnies who commented there, you guys are a joy.
> 
> Special thanks to [Island_of_Reil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil), who has effectively (and efficiently!) beta'ed this work with unerring insight and kindness; and to [Paperiuni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paperiuni), gentlenerd and scholar, without whom I would perhaps write one word a year if that.

On the train to the Eisenhorn mountain pass, Amika ate cake and contemplated war.

The wintry Northwest of Hyem flew by outside the compartment windows, pines and snow and sometimes a town awash in midwinter festival green. The festivities were not due for two more weeks, but the quiet and ordinary people of these quiet and ordinary places returned colour to their landscape at any excuse to do so. The cake, a specialty of this region, was fresh and moist, piled high with cream and cloudberries. For a dish prepared on a train, it reminded her of midwinter feasts at the Kaiser’s palace, much like the one that she was very likely to miss this year.

“You needn’t have come yourself,” Marschall Viskinde complained. He had stoutly refused a bite of her cake. “This hardly justifies the presence of the Land’s Own Guardian.”

Amika finished chewing a cloudberry. She put the stem on the plate. “Do you feel this is too much like political intervention, Marschall?”

“After how it was in your predecessor’s day - no telling. Festus Detrich did what he willed.” Nils Viskinde had spent twenty hard years of his life keeping Detrich and Amika’s father, the Lord Regent Emen Stattenholme, from coming to physical blows. He was short and strong and as stout as his denial of the treat, and his now-silver moustache has a way of bristling at the suggestion of any breach of duty on the part of Emen’s daughter. Of all the generals travelling with her on the trail, he was the only one she allowed in her own compartment. “But the Kaiser might consider it so, if he turned his eye to the matter… or if someone else turned his eye.”

“I should be grateful if Kaiser Franz turned an occasional eye to the Schervo railroad.” Amika took another forkful of cream. It tasted much too sweet for food prepared on a train full of soldiers.

“That’s his business; and your Guardians’, I suppose, if there is indeed foul play. But certainly not yours in person. What do you imagine you’ll do, Land’s Own, if Schervo really has reneged and destroyed the railhead?”

Amika looked through her own breath fogging at the window at her winter-sleeping country outside. She closed her teeth tightly on the fork in her mouth, if not so tightly that Viskinde would see it. _What can I do, as Land’s Own?_

With the train speeding through, mile by rushing mile, she could reach out her mental fingers across the roots of of her people’s souls in the earth like stroking the strings of a great instrument. Her power as Land’s Own rang in them all. Small souls in the passing villages, ensconced in their sense of home and place, the occasional quicksilver light of a busy town bustling even in the snow. Now and then a wanderer, a caravan or a trapper on his trails, shrouded by winter but clear to her noting eye. In one hamlet, a brightness marking the presence of one of her Guardians, power from the webwork of souls pooling in the Centred soul. It would be a simple faith that made that Centre here, in the ties of the village, or the inevitable return of spring.

Hyem, souls and land and the light between them. She had grown skilled in calling them to her mind since her ascension, in the midst of Schervo’s secession war not fifteen months earlier, and they have grown brighter within her in turn. If Schervo had turned from the budding peace, had destroyed its symbol that has been months building…

“I’ve been told that Captain Samaren will be meeting us at the Eisenhorn,” Viskinde said quietly.

The train chose that moment to jolt with some crooked beam. Amika tore her eyes from the landscape, within and without. Inside the compartment, in the other sense of her power, she felt her marschall’s presence gather itself, preparing for a confrontation he knew he would lose.

She slid her plate aside and folded her hands on the table, pale fingers together. “Captain Samaren answers to me. I may wish his talents at the pass.”

“His talent at wanton slaughter,” Viskinde said with dark disgust. “Here I cannot blame anyone who turns the Kaiser’s eye.”

“And still. Two missions, ten men have been lost investigating the railhead. Saul Samaren is unlike any other man.”

“Saul Samaren,” her marschall stressed, “is hardly a man at all.”

Quiet in her seat, Amika cringed inwardly. She was surprised that in fifteen months Viskinde had not learned such an essential rule of dealing with Samaren. _Call him Rogue Guardian, Fiend of No Nation. Call him an exile. But do not call him a monster._

“If Ranna Vandavern has ordered the railhead destroyed, then she will be feeling for Hyemi souls on her country’s soil,” she reasoned, as much as reason shaped this argument. “With his soul uprooted, Samaren can go in any land unfound.”

“And if she has not, Land’s Own Guardian?” Viskinde asked, his voice suitably wintry. He put his own hands on the table and leaned in, closer than any man who invoked her title should have dared. “And you send that beast of a mercenary onto her native soil – what sign can she take, except of war?”

Amika inhaled. She reached inwards and down her roots and filaments, towards his where they linked, the link clear and tangible with closeness, easy to shape as clay in the hand. But before she pressed, he stood away, and turned his back to her and his eyes to the far window.

“You’ve brought the Rogue Guardian to us, saying you have sworn him to service to this country,” he said to the snow without. “Festus Detrich’s killer. You who are Detrich’s successor, to us who were Detrich’s brothers in arms. We acquiesced. For Hyem. A new Hyem that had made you its Land’s Own in our brother’s place.”

 _A new Hyem, where the Land’s Own does not do what she wills_ , Amika added silently. But he did not say it, and she let him continue. “But we know Samaren. We have fought him, and we know his craft. Amika – you have a tiger leashed, not a guard dog. And riding that tiger will take you only one way.”

The train churned on in raw silence for a mile or two. The farmhouses were thinning. They were near to the gateway to the Eisenhorn, natural border to Hyem and Schervo, and at the edge of her awareness Amika began to sense the borderland. Or perhaps the mere knowledge of their coming; she had not been there since her first tour as Land’s Own Guardian, but she remembered that feeling. The sense that the ground was not quite solid beneath her feet, that there was a thin film, near transparent but not, between her and all she perceived of the world.

She rose and stood behind Viskinde by the window.

“Do you think the Kaiser will go to war on Schervo, Nils? Would he listen to you, and his generals?”

Viskinde snorted. “Who knows what Franz will do? Even he should know better than to try and retake a seceded province the very year after independence. But a young monarch, not two years on the throne…”

“And would he listen to me?”

The marschall paused, discomfited. He looked back at her.

“He would have listened to Festus Detrich,” he said at length. The train howled with a cloud of white steam, gathering speed on the last leg of its journey. “But Festus Detrich is dead. You shouldn’t have come, Amika.”

She tried to put a hand on the old soldier’s arm, but he waved her off with a shake of his head, turned and left the compartment. She let him go join his officers. Her position did not give her true authority to stop him.

There was little to do but to return to her seat, her cake. But her appetite wasn’t what it had been. Unthinking, she nudged the cream with her spoon into the shape of the towering Eisenhorn, sliced the embattled pass in the white. The sky outside had darkened; more snow was falling.

Perhaps the railhead was whole, the reports mistaken or falsified. Perhaps the missions had been lost for entirely mundane reasons in the Eisenhorn winter. Who knew if Ranna Vandavern might not answer Franz’s telegrams and resolve the entire matter before the midwinter feast…

She thought all those thoughts, but none of them stuck. Her first war had cured her utterly of such optimism. She was not looking forward to the second.

 

~**~

 

The military camp had settled in a reassuringly ordered fashion into the workers’ camp that the railroad builders had left behind for winter. Amika, Nils Viskinde at her shoulder, stepped off onto a platform that had been neatly cleared of snow and looked across rows of small and well-built shelters in the last of the daylight. The paths between them bustled with the activity of day’s end. All was neat, well-practiced: under the officers’ watchful eyes, gear changed hands, guards resettled and cooking fires were started. But she saw, at a glance reinforced by a probing with her deeper sense, that the efficiency covered a creeping weariness. These men had not expected to be at the slopes of the Eisenhorn in midwinter, suddenly called to a cold duty on an uncertain border. And wariness too, perhaps; even at a glance, she saw rather more guards than she would have expected, here still some miles away from the borderland.

Her survey was perforce brief – the platform was quickly crowded with soldiers and officers who had come to welcome the generals she’d shared the train with, and perhaps also to catch a glimpse of the Land’s Own Guardian arriving unasked for. Viskinde’s man found him, his own saluting welcome quickly followed by a summons to a first conference immediately after dinner. It was not, Amika knew as she watched the marschall led away, a conference to which she was strictly invited, and it was good to have dinner over which to consider her approach to it. If only she could find someone in whose company she would not be bothered by either curious soldiers or suspicious generals…

The answer was obvious. She looked about until she found, among the staring soldiers, one with the right insignia. An older man, standing apart from the others. She summoned him to her side with a glance and nodded in appreciation at his swift approach.

Some of the soldiers moved aside for him, murmuring. If his insignia of his unit would not have told, that much would have. She gave another nod at his salute.

“Good man, if you please, take me to Captain Samaren.”

A minute later, her own gear arranged for, he led her through the darkening camp where she saw discipline run taut up close. Every man who saw her had a question in his eyes. She didn’t linger. It was hard to think how alien it must be for some, perhaps many of them to be suddenly near a border when just last year both sides of the Eisenhorn had been Hyem. A home turned a strange place felt even less safe, less known than an alien frontier.

The soldier’s unit was camped a little away from the others, just as he had been standing apart on the platform. Tents here; no built shelters for them, though she considered they may have preferred it so as a point of pride. They had no high-ranking military guest among them. They belonged to one man alone.

And to her.

She steeled herself with the reminder as the soldier led her to the edge of that camp, where a drilling field was demarcated, surrounded by men watching. Whatever Nils Viskinde’s fears, the man there was her man. _Or my monster, but mine, this way or that._

The soldiers moved aside to clear the view for her and her guide. There on the field, men were facing each other, practicing their sword- and foot-work on uncleared snow. Most worked in pairs, but towards the back one man was fighting three - though it was closer to toying.

Saul Samaren, Amika observed, was being very generous to his opponents. He was using a sword in place of his Ilyigan chain-whip, and rather than disarming them in seconds, let them make pass after pass. He gave short sharp critiques of their form, impersonal, sometimes vicious, and he laughed when they swore at their misses. But his sweating understudies - mature veterans all - took it all and came for more. They had to. They would get no better lessons from their commander who broke men’s souls for his pleasure.

“Sir.” The soldier leading Amika called out to catch his captain’s attention. “Frowe Stattenholme is here.”

Not missing a step, Samaren stopped his three students with a raised hand and turned to meet Amika’s eyes. In a flash she realized it had been nearly three months since their last meeting, the longest she had let him out of her sight since he came into her service. He didn’t look any different, and yet, she felt the need to look closely.

“Hah. So she is.” There was a note of sly satisfaction in his voice. He handed his sword to one of the panting soldiers and snapped a word at him when the man gaped awestruck at Amika. “Not for you, domé. Back to it. Another day’s practice and you might be able to at least draw a sword before I kill you.” Amika watched them nod to the command without resentment, falling easily into a new pattern in their drill, before turning her eyes back to the Rogue Guardian’s approach.

“Captain Samaren.”

“Doma Amika.”

He joined her at the exit from the drilling ground, drew to straighten for a salute – whatever else could be said of him, he had always had impeccable manners – but the gesture was aborted when he turned away instead and sneezed hard into a cloth he had pulled from his sleeve. Amika blinked as he gave a small discontented sound.

“Sorry, doma. I have a cold.” He wiped his nose and completed the salute while she stared, mystified at this vision of the Fiend of No Nation thus plighted. “This is no campaigning weather, even for me.”

Amika raised her brow. “I have heard that you fought in Betairun, where winter freezes men’s eyelids shut.”

“So I did, but I didn’t enjoy it.” He gestured to her back past the watching men, to walk with him among the campfires of his unit. Order seemed not as tight here, soldiers making their own circles and wandering to and fro, but the camp was very clean for the hard men who had made a hard home of it. And no carelessly spilled liquor, here where most of the troops, like their commander, followed the Eastern Covenant. “The mountain men in my unit brave it better. I’ve learned a trick or two in the days since we arrived. But no one wants to be here – not my men, nor the others.”

“How long have you been camped here waiting?”

“Four days. Your Kaiser’s soldiers arrived on the second morning.”

“You are the Kaiser’s man too, by law, Captain.”

Samaren shrugged. “You know what I am.”

 _I fear that I do_. Amika looked around her. Samaren’s troops were professional soldiers all, hand-picked, but she could see the trepidation written in their faces and under their weathered skins. They had come a long way to wait for her here on the uncertain border. Perhaps they worried that it would not have been worth their while.

She didn’t try to smile at the soldiers she passed, but here and there nodded. She saw them, recognized them. Some nodded in return; one or two even raised cups towards her. “Your men seem well and ready, for all they might not want.” Samaren too was looking his soldiers over as they went. He made and returned no salute, but they gave him theirs nonetheless, and she thought he might be pleased at it.

He touched the chain-whip folded neatly at his belt. “Men like this are always ready, if there’s anything to be ready for. We’ve tested your Gunpowder Guardian’s weapons to perfection, and spent your four days well drilling in this snow –“ with a grimace, and a cough into his fist – “and I did not enjoy that, either.”

“I should no doubt be grateful all your unit is not plagued,” Amika said dryly.

“No doubt. So – do we march to take the Eisenhorn pass?”

There was, Amika realized of a sudden, a deathly silence around them.

“This is not a matter to a fireside chat, right here in the middle of the camp,” she said after a moment, after she remembered how to speak to soldiers. Great Sun, but she had lost that touch as quickly as she had gained it in the last summer’s war. “The generals will confer on that matter. I am here to lend aid to whatever course they plot.”

Samaren snorted. “You have your Guardians for that. Not me.”

“Are you my man, Captain?”

“And yours alone, doma.”

“Then I have you for whatever I deem needful.” Still the silence. She wondered what lines she risked crossing by speaking to him this way before all his soldiers. “All we have of the Eisenhorn railhead is hearsay. Hearsay does not send a country on its second war in two years. And even if so – “ she breathed in, surprisingly herself with the words’ unpleasant taste in the back of her throat, “it is the Kaiser’s word that calls, not mine.”

She had to hold Samaren’s eyes for a cold moment longer, but he did look away at last, with a nod that she thought was more to himself than her. A gesture of satisfaction, almost. The idle chat of soldiers at rest resumed around them. Amika felt tired and parched. And she still had the conference to attend. At least she would have one certainty in it.

“I should like to rest before the generals convene,” she said, breaking the moment. “I will take dinner in your command tent. And after I shall properly inspect your camp and men. It has been some time.” And tired or not, she needed to remember how it was done. “I will not keep you from your affairs. Have a deputy see to what I need.”

In a heartbeat, three men around different fires had leapt to their feet, ready and willing to wait on the Land’s Own’s pleasure. Amika wished she could be touched, but such eager obedience from such men was disconcerting. She did offer a grateful curtsy to the one Samaren waved to her side. They were her men too. And they were Hyemi. She could not feel Samaren’s exile soul, but she could feel theirs.

 

“I shall see you soon.” She dismissed him with a final turn of her hand. He gave another salute, quicker and looser than before, and turned back to the fighting ring.

 

~**~

 

“Do you turn me away, leutnant?” Amika inquired softly, watching the door guard sweat.

She had considered joining the question to a push of her presence against the young man’s. Bearing down upon his roots, she could make him shift aside as if he were little more than an unlocked door. But that was not the entrance that she wanted to make to the generals’ council. There were other means, certainly. She had changed from her travelling suit into flowing whites, the dress that called to mind the regent’s daughter she had been before her ascension, wore the pious sun-disk at her breast and had commandeered a nurse to brush out and pin up her hair. Serenity and dignity: the new Hyem’s peacetime Land’s Own. And now, patience.

The young leutnant buckled, shifting his rifle from attention to brace its butt on the ground. He put his cap to his chest and bowed to her as she walked past. She took courage from his downcast eyes behind her and flowed into the room where half of Hyem’s military leadership sat.

The room was in fact the entire small building, and there were too few seats around the table, where a map displayed the Eisenhorn and its two sides. Hyem and Schervo, which fifteen months ago had, too, been Hyem. On the map there was no border. The question of who could sit and who must stand was answered mostly by rank, though some of the older men, Viskinde among them, preferred to show their enduring vigour by rejecting a seat with contempt. Sitting or standing, all of them drew towards one side of the table. On the other side was Saul Samaren, in a chair doubtless taken with little thought to anything like asking, drinking from a steaming tin cup as he surveyed the map in private thought.

He raised his gaze to her along with the others, but soon looked away. The rest ran the gamut from open interest to banked glares. She gave them all a curtsy. A slight one.

“Frowe Stattenholme,” Viskinde greeted her. Not _Amika_ here, but not _Land’s Own Guardian_ either _._ “You honour us.”

“Not at all, Marschall.” She raised one hand. “Do not let my presence disrupt you. I am here solely for the part I play in the progress of the railroad plan.”

“This is highly irregular,” someone muttered from the back; Amika chose not to try to place who. Viskinde’s gaze, along with others’, went to the head of the table and the room’s most senior occupant. General Ander Kirschen, seventy-two years old, capable of cutting every button off a challenger’s coat before that challenger could draw his own sword.

Kirschen lingered a beat, then waved impatience. As Festus Detrich’s right-hand man he had grown used to such irregularities. “I’d rather this than the Land’s Own having only news from afar on a matter that may well require her Guardians. Go on, Nils, you were saying, the original report?”

“Yes. The man is dead.” Another murmur of unease ran through the room. It took attention back from Amika with surety. “And so much for our only eyewitness. The surgeon said his wounds were a wild animal’s work, though he had claimed it had been a Guardian’s attack.”

“A Guardian of Schervo?” Kirschen shook his head. “Uncentred men rarely escape a Guardian alive, even mortally wounded. This makes me doubt the poor fellow’s report more than Frowe Vandavern’s people.”

“Maybe one of Adalas.” Gustav Basholme filled the room with his rumble. Where his friend Kirschen was a sword, slim, cold, and precise, he was round and matchlessly ferocious – a cannonball. “We cannot discount another stab from Adalas, now that Frowe-twice-damned-Vandavern’s torn this chunk from our border…”

“Has the Kaiser inquired of Lord Rittner?” Kirschen asked Viskinde, whose moustache twisted with his lip.

“The Kaiser opined that winter is no campaigning season, and either way, Ranna Vandavern would not dare go to war as a reigning Land’s Own before Schervo has a proper head of state or parliament. He then went back to his breakfast.”

“A sumptuous one I’m sure,” Basholme growled.

“It hardly matters. Rittner will not telegraph us his government’s design on the Schervo border…”

“Surely the Kaiser isn’t all wrong?” A younger officer spoke from the throng. The commander of one of the units in the camp, most likely. “A newly ascendant Land’s Own, after such tumult in her country, looking for war…”

“Festus Detrich did, after his revolution,” Samaren said quietly.

He was running thoughtful fingers across the lines of the map. With those few words, he drew every eye, from the young commander to Kirschen himself. Most of the eyes blazed red fury at the very mention of the name from his lips. But the old general leaned across the table, looking intently at the traces on the map.

“Do you have an opinion on this, Samaren?”

Amika craned her neck to look and listen more closely. Kirschen spoke clipped and cold, but had pronounced the name correctly, as it was spoken in Samaren’s native Ilyiga. The Rogue Guardian glanced around the daggers in the eyes around the table, and answered casual and conversational. “I know you’re wasting words, Domé Kirschen. It isn’t war now that is anyone’s concern. What you wish to know is what Schervo does here – “ he reached up to plant two fingers west of the Eisernhorn, where the slopes on Schervo’s side of the pass fell much flatter and easier than on Hyem’s. “Whether it is amassing arms for spring where you can no longer reach.”

Kirschen exchanged looks with Basholme, who heaved a sigh but nodded. To Amika’s surprise, he turned to her.

“I should state this openly, Land’s Own Guardian. This was my reason for supporting the railroad project. The terrain of the pass gives Schervo a tremendous advantage in moving troops from their side to ours. The rail would have evened it out.”

Amika could only nod, assuming her best neutrally displeased expression. _He thinks I did not know._

“I doubt this is news to Frowe Vandavern,” she said.

“No.” He, too, sighed. “And so, fromen, I fear Captain Samaren is right. The question is not whether the railhead is destroyed. I believe the report. The question is whether it was Schervon hands that did it, ahead of a spring invasion, or Adalan, to sow discord. But I cannot think of how to learn that, save by spying across the Eisenhorn and the borderland in this of all seasons.”

A grim silence settled, then broke before a dozen small exchanges and murmurs of thought. _Send a Guardian_ , someone said, but a wiser man corrected, _no Guardian of Hyem can enter Schervo without Vandavern knowing._ Said another, _send an Uncentred spy who is Schervo-side already_ , and Viskinde swore, saying, _if I had spies left in Schervo, would we be here at all?_

Inevitably, someone came to it: “Send the Rogue Guardian. He’s here already.”

The silence was thick and uneasy. Amika’s heart leapt to her throat in alarm and in vindication. She felt Viskinde’s gaze turn to her, felt it through his roots in a backwash of cold needles. She dared not say a word, not even shift where she stood.

Basholme and Kirschen were more attentive to the man who had made the suggestion, the unit commander who had spoken up before. “He can do it, surely,” Kirschen said in clear intrigue, though Basholme made a grinding sound in his throat.

“And if he can’t – if he is caught?”

“Then he is no agent of ours,” the young man said simply. “Merely a mercenary sniffing after war. Just as with any spy, but ten times more believable.”

“All the continent knows that Saul Samaren is sworn to Hyem.”

“And all the continent knows how Saul Samaren keeps his oaths.”

Amika couldn’t help but glance at Samaren with all the rest. He was leaning back in his chair with one ankle over one knee, sipping his drink, following the exchange with a sealed face. At their questioning looks he stretched out a hand to the drawn line of mountains. “It’s no small thing to ask, the pass, the border… but I’ve done greater. I could do it, but – but I – “ he trailed off with a sneeze. The young commander huffed in disdain.

“But for this little cold? How convenient. You’ll do as you’re ordered, exile.”

Samaren took the time to blow his nose and tuck the handkerchief away before replying. He looked bored. “Do you know what we did for colds in Betairun, domé?”

“What, then?”

“Drank fresh horse blood. Hot from an opened jugular, like _so._ ” His hand darted out. The young man jolted back, going for his sword with the raw pallor of fear, before he realized the moving hand was empty. Only Kirschen’s outheld palm stopped him from drawing the sword nonetheless in his rage. But Samaren only laughed. “Now, I would do it, but I doubt any of you would wholly believe any tale I bring back. There’s no use in a spy sent by men who do not trust him.”

“He’s not wrong,” Basholme said before anyone could protest – and, Amika thought, no one meant to.

But, she thought next, that was not the end of it.

She stepped forward, into the throng. “I shall believe him. And moreover I mean to go with him.”

 _I might have spoken more carefully_ , she chided herself a moment later when the room erupted into shouts. The main response was outrage: at which aspect of her suggestion, she did not know, though all of them at once was perhaps the likeliest answer. That she trusted Samaren, that she would be his minder, that the Land’s Own Guardian would go into enemy lands – she felt for the incensed men, really, even as she longed to silence them all with the press of her presence rather than wait for them to shout themselves out. “Fromen, please, give me a moment to speak.”

“There’s nothing to speak of, Amika,” Viskinde hissed. The nods around him to this flagrant breach of etiquette made blood rise in her head. “You cannot not go to Schervo!”

“Only to the bordermark. My captain will take it from there. But if he fails to spy or is caught, then my presence shall be a clear-sent signal. Ranna Vandavern surely knows I will not come to make war.” They had spoken of the railroad together, Schervo’s Land’s Own and her, had understood each other. “If she knows I am in the borderland, she will come to see me.”

“If you make it across the borderland! With _him_ at your side! Amika, I forbid it!”

The rising blood flooded into her cheeks. She took another step forward and surged against his roots. Viskinde stumbled, grabbed the back of a chair, swayed against it. “You do not _forbid_ me, Fro Viskinde.”

“Land’s Own, please,” Kisrchen spoke softly. He did well to draw Amika’s attention from his pinned comrade. “This is work for a soldier.”

“I was a soldier and a Guardian against Adalas, only a year ago."

“No one has forgotten. But you know that this is not your place. A Land’s Own Guardian cannot intervene this way in politics and war.”

Amika tipped her head a fraction. “Festus Detrich did.”

“Festus Detrich made mistakes,” Viskinde murmured, chin against his chest. “Festus Detrich died.”

“Consider that I go as an ambassador, General. That is a place I may claim, however in extremis.”

“Now she’s not wrong, Ander,” Basholme piped up, half smiling within his beard.

Kirschen shot him a look. “A new Hyem, I’d thought.”

“Three-times-damn to that. Could we have had our peace now without Festus to win the war? The Kaiser’s as busy with breakfast as his father was with painting. And she has the dog on a leash.”

“And she alone,” Samaren said slyly. Basholme nodded at him, almost with respect.

“There you have it. And Great Sun knows, if there’s another war in spring…”

Amika stiffened. “I will not have another war.”

“All the better, then, to call Frowe Vandavern to accounting now. Festus would rest easier with this legacy.”

“Is this his legacy?” Kirschen spoke to the air.

“You would know, wouldn’t you? You knew him best.”

“In the revolution, I thought so. But Emen Stattenholme knew him better. I feel a great fool sometimes, Gus, taken to the bed of a man who was closer to his enemy than his lover.” The old general’s shoulders slumped a touch. He looked at her. He wanted to ask her to reconsider, Amika realized, but hadn’t it in him to beg.

Patience. She endured his silent dignity until it did her work for her. Kirschen straightened again and saluted her with an arm pride had stiffened where age could not. “Very well, Frowe Stattenholme. Since I cannot stop you clearly my duty is to aid you. Speak your will.”

“You are a loyal man, General Kirschen.” A petty salve, but she saw him fill himself with it nonetheless. It would be a Centre of sorts to him, she knew, through whatever happened next. A pillar of faith to wrap all else around. “I shall go with Captain Samaren to the pass, and if I cannot have the truth of the land there, we will then cross the borderland. You must inform the Kaiser that we have had no recourse – no – “ she raised her hand to belay the command at one look at Viskinde’s ashen face. “I shall compose the telegram myself.”

“Will you take a guard to the railhead?” Basholme inquired. Samaren, who had been watching with interest, stirred in annoyance at the suggestion, but a cough stopped his response. Amika considered.

“We shall. It cannot hurt.” And all the better if it needled Samaren’s pride. She was not doing this to show him any favour. “Some of your own trusty men, if you will, General Basholme.”

“With pleasure, Land’s Own.” He offered his own salute. This one was fierce, and Amika treasured it.

“You understand, Frowe Stattenholme,” the young unit commander spoke up, briefly startling her into meeting his eyes, “that we are entrusting you to the man who killed Festus Detrich.”

Every man around him muttered assent. Amika looked around at a throng of stony faces, strained as cold and white as the snow. Opposite them all, the man who killed Festus Detrich sat grinning like a wolf.

Her chest clenched, but there was no other response she could make now. “I thank you for your care, fromen. But you do no entrust me, any more than you forbid.” _And I am not Festus Detrich._ Or at least, she would not make his mistakes.

 

~**~

 

“That was quite the performance, doma,” Samaren said once they had left the building. The generals had gone out as a tight group, stopping to stab their collective gaze into the Rogue Guardian walking alongside the Land’s Own, but the looks of the younger officers and common soldiers were more wary. They stood alone in the bustle of the camp. Amika pulled the hood of her cloak back up and shivered.

“It was not for your sake.” She widened her steps, eager for the warmth of her cabin in the train. Samaren nodded. She knew already that he had not thought otherwise.

He kept pace at her side. “I did not realize that you missed being a soldier.”

“I am nothing of the sort.”

“It will not be a lady’s pleasure ride, up into the pass. And winter is still deepening. Do you mean to camp in the borderland and wait for Ranna Vandavern?”

“She will speak with me. One Land’s Own to another, I do not think she will lie.”

“And if she tells you a truth you don’t want to hear?”

Amika paused. Her thoughts had not touched on that moment, the two Land’s Own Guardians facing each other across the borderland, war waiting to break out between them. She pictured each them wielding the might of her own country’s souls against one another, locking them like swords, and felt faint.

“I could be there,” Samaren spoke half a step behind her. “I could end it there.”

She spun to stare at him. “You would kill an ascendant Land’s Own?”

“Why not? I’ve killed an eclipsed one already.”

“On foreign soil?” Her stomach heaved, and the snow seemed to heave with it.

“Fortune favours the bold, Doma Amika,” Samaren said quietly.

 _End it there._ He was not wrong. This could end more than Ranna Vandavern. In one stroke – of a sword, of a bolt of lightning – it could end Schervo.

“No.” She began walking again. Quickly, quickly. He hurried to keep up. “I will not permit it. It is monstrous.” She did not care if he resented the term. If he thought this weakness on her part. She glanced at him walking beside her and pictured him as he must have walked at Ranna Vandavern’s side during the war, had no doubt just as casually promised to deliver Festus Detrich’s head. Had Viskinde truly been wrong? “I am the new Hyem. There will be no war.”

“And if I disobey?”

“You have sworn an oath, Captain Samaren.”

For a long moment he walked in silence, while she breathed through her roots and schooled her heart to the winter-earth calmness. _Fortune favours the bold_ , that was the faith of his Centre, and rogue or not a, Centre shaped a Guardian’s being. Nowhere could he test his boldness and his fortune better than at war. _You have a tiger leashed, not a guard dog._

She had never been such a fool as to think an oath would hold him. But her patience might, the reminder of her strength that he had never broken.

“Consider it along the way,” he said at last, even with a shrug. “You know my view. I told it to you at Reylan Vandavern’s grave.” _There will always be war, because there will always be men like me_. She was not like to forget those words. “And as for that, I do not think Doma Vandavern has forgotten your part in his death. It may be Schervo’s Land’s Own you speak to now, but before that she was his sister.”

It was true, Amika had to admit. Though it was eerie to hear it from him. “Is this sympathy, Fiend of No Nation?”

“I know how loss breaks a soul, doma. I’ve employed it often enough to do just that.” Saying that, his tone was all casual conversation again. He stopped at the steps leading up to the platform as she began to climb them. “It’s best we leave as soon as the sun rises. I’ll see to finding gear for you. Will you give me leave to tell Domé Basholme I will take my pick of his men?”

“You may tell him, but he may not listen. I know the faith of your Centre, Captain, but please pick your battles when you battle my generals.” She arched an eyebrow as Samaren sighed in very ordinary frustration, muttering behind his handkerchief. “And leave whatever else to your deputies, if you will. Tonight, you should rest. It won’t do for your little cold to hinder you when we brave the borderlands.”

“ _Hah_ ,” Samaren said, all venom and resignation, and walked away to nurse, if nothing else, his pride.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No plan survives contact with the enemy.

They took a section of the train to the base of the slopes, and after that a horse-pulled railcar where four of Basholme’s lent guards – the fifth driving – sat awkwardly around Amika and Samaren. At least the tightly packed space was warm. A haphazard little mission, but Amika relished every moment spent on Hyemi soil. The borderland was near. It pressed against the edges of her, with mounting urgency, like the awareness of a breath running out

Though the presence of her countrymen cheered and comforted her immensely, she came to regret asking Basholme for members of his own guard. They were young officers, picked by their fearless commander for their fire as well as their skill, and knew their own worth. With this confidence they mocked Samaren for every infirmity his cold forced him to show. At first he laughed along with the good humour he often showed men he considered beneath his notice, but at the railcar climbed, Amika could tell that he was running out of patience along with the hot drink in his flask. She cursed him silently for not taking the rest she had commanded. Then she employed her famous diplomacies.

“Did you really drink fresh horse blood as medicine in Betairun?” she asked.

“Not I, but some men – yes.” He stopped to sneeze, but this time the appalled officers made no comment. “I was less used to foreign ways then. Today, I’d have done the same.”

“The cure worse than the sickness,” one of the officers said. The others nodded, faces tight with revulsion.

Samaren shrugged. “You’ve been to war, haven’t you, domé? Few men die in battle. They die of dysentery, influenza, wound-rot. I endured all three when I was young in Ilyiga, and if the Eastern Covenant was not a clean faith I’d have died of syphilis. You tell me which cure is worse than that.” He sneezed again and rubbed the heel of one hand between his eyes, looking, Amika thought, distinctly morose. “If we could spare the horses I would bleed one right now. My head hurts.”

It was not quite the distraction she had intended for him, though at least now the young officers were occupied discussing the comparative horrors of foreign medicine. Amika left them to it and glanced through the railcar’s small window. The path that the rail tracked grew narrow, and the heights dizzying.

Up there, the Eisenhorn pass. The muffled tune of the horses’ hooves changed as they came to a bridge over a wide crevasse. Kaiser Franz’s great-grandfather had built it, to bring Schervo closer after Schervo had become Hyem. Amika took a long breath as they crossed its middle. The other side of the bridge was the borderland.

The ground burst beneath and took the breath out of her.

At first, Amika thought the crossing had broken her senses. Then she realized that the railcar had been thrown through the air, and in the next breath Samaren was grabbing her and leaping out through the open door. The air behind them was full of smoke and snow. The reek of gunpowder. The screams of horses. Of men. They crashed against a snowbank, rolled and sank. Samaren was at once on his feet, weapon drawn, a milky fog gathering about him. Amika lay stunned, blinded by that same fog, ears ringing. She didn’t know what was happening. But she knew that the bridge was gone.

The Kaiser’s Bridge was gone. She felt it like a slash across the face. They were in the borderland, and the way back to Hyem was shattered and shut. Her roots twisted and writhed and knotted themselves in agony. She reached out to the souls of her soldiers and found only two out of five, raw with panic and confusion.

Not Samaren. The crossing was nothing to the Rogue Guardian, and the promise of violence had cured his headache quite instantly. He had freed them both from the railcar before it crashed back to the ground and smashed those left inside it. Now his Guardian’s power was a cold blaze around them, the fog charged with the incipient electricity of the storm that always waited for his call. He’d saved their lives and now he was looking to kill.

In the murky mist, Amika listened. She heard the echoes of the bridge stones crashing in the crevasse. A horse still screamed. Then a gunshot.

A light went out in her inner eye. And now she was also screaming.

There was rage in it. In her own land it would have flared. But here she felt nothing but the frozen earth of the borderland beneath her, and there was nothing for her loose filaments to draw on but that last, flagging soul somewhere past the fog. She wrapped the tendrils of her power desperately around the surviving Hyemi soldier. She had only her own strength to send through them, a pitiful trickle that could not coalesce in the Uncentred man.

“Quiet, doma,” Samaren snapped under his breath. Amika’s scream died in her throat.  _ My man, save my man _ . But of course he could not move away from where she lay.

He did spread the fog wider. Voices within it swore. Another gunshot silenced the horse, and now Amika could hear them clearly, men’s voices speaking in the dialect shared by both sides of the Eisenhorn. Alarmed men; they knew what the fog meant.  _ Should’ve known he’d be here _ , one murmured, and another said,  _ we don’t need to kill him, just shoot the last horse and winter will do the rest… _

“I see you, you know,” Samaren called out. Not very loudly; with a low, easy malice. “Come forward, lads. I might let you go. Amateur soldiers aren’t worth my time to kill.”

Everything stilled. Amika tried to rise to her knees, but the world pitched and spiralled wildly around her and she nearly retched. The physical pain in her head and soul-confusion of the crossing built on each other on. Her world narrowed to the whiteness of the snow and the fog, and the keening whistle of Samaren’s chain-whip as he spun it at his side.

Their attackers whispered to each other somewhere in the mist. “You’re no true Guardian, exile!” one of them shouted. His fellows couldn’t hush him in time. “So call off you power and face us like a man!”

Samaren laughed. “I shall. And any of you who has a shot may take it.”

He crouched low, shielding her with his body as a gale rose to sweep the fog away. Amika couldn’t see what it exposed, but a moment later there was gunfire. A bullet seared over Samaren’s head and he ducked aside from the path of another he’s been ready for; then it was his turn. It took seconds. One moment he was keeping Amika down, the next he was a flash across the snow, and she heard shouts, confused and terrified gunshots, metal in flesh and gurgling rattles. Four bodies falling, one after another. He’d lied when he said he might let them go. Any killing was worth Samaren’s time.

“My soldier,” Amika said weakly when he knelt back at her side, holding out a bloody arm for her to cling to as she pulled herself up. The scene swam in her sight. Smoke rose from the crevasse, mere yards away, and bodies were scattered around the wreck of the railcar. Four dead Hyemi soldiers and their four attackers who wore no uniform. Three of the horses had died trapped in their harnesses and now lay in small lakes of blood. The fourth stood uninjured but frozen in terror. Amika understood it entirely.

Samaren helped her to her feet, quick, professional, not tender, and let her pull him along as she stumbled to the last of her guard. The young man’s body was twisted at the waist so that his torso lay at an awkward angle to his legs. He looked in too much shock to be in pain. He did not look like he was going to live out the hour.

Amika’s knees gave way, but Samaren did not let her fall. He held up her full weight for her. “Give him rites, doma. I’m going to end it.”

“No,” she mumbled, hollow and fading. “Not on foreign soil, no, the bridge… the bridge…”

“Gone. They must have planted the explosives all along it. This was no layman’s work.”

“Don’t. He must live. The last…”

“No. And we might not either, unless we hurry.” He glanced up and Amika’s eyes followed. The sky was still pale, but the colour of the light had turned. They would have had just time enough to make it to the railhead, if the world hadn’t been ripped from its seams. “These men were not equipped for long ambush in the snow. They have a base nearby with supplies, but we will never find it after dark. So give him this grace and be done. It’s more than his comrades had.”

She was too dazed to wonder if he meant it as a cruelty. Half slumped over the staring young soldier, she reached into the filaments of his spirit, felt their blind groping for the land where they had been planted. No prayer came into her pounding head. Only the vision of the dying man’s home, a district, a town, a street. The first sounds of his parents’ voices speaking in his mother tongue. She cradled his soul among her roots until Samaren’s blade landed and all vision and sound vanished.

 

~**~

 

She woke to a rocking motion that she only gradually associated with horseback. Her head was in a vice of pain and she felt the distance from Hyem like a thirst inside her bones. It was almost full dark.

Samaren had tied her to the horse, it seemed, to keep her from falling. He was leading the beast through the deep snow, breathing hard, sniffling and coughing.  For a moment she almost forgot that he was her man now, almost panicked to be at his mercy, trussed and led, and without her guard. Then she remembered that the men were gone. She was alone, and away from her land, and he was all she had.

“Captain,” she mumbled, unable to raise her voice.

He glanced back without stopping. She couldn’t read more in his face than tiredness, but he gave a nod. “Doma Amika. I wasn’t sure you’d wake again.”

“Where… where do you take us?”

“The Schervons’ shelter isn’t far. We’d have made it already if this nag didn’t fight me with every step. I hope they have other horses.” He doubled over a ferocious sneeze. “I hope they have dry firewood.”

Amika closed her eyes again. Better horses, to ride where? Don’t fall asleep with a head wound, she’d been taught as a soldier. Focus on the pain if you must. She focused on the pain. “They’ve destroyed the Kaiser’s Bridge…”

“Yes. A waste of time to have destroyed the railhead too. It’s a long way back we’ll be taking.”

“How much time?”

“In this weather? Who knows.”

Her thoughts tumbled back into disarray. The railhead, the bridge…

“They meant to kill me.” The thought crystalized. She raised herself in the saddle, in abrupt awareness of her own survival. “Or kill whoever came from the Hyem side. Did they know… an ascendant Land’s Own!”

“They almost succeeded,” Samaren said, with envy. “Imagine, such a feat by accident…”

“They’ll think I am dead at the camp. All the generals. Nils…”

“Once they send someone after us, yes. If snow doesn’t cover the evidence of what happened. Or they’ll think you captured – that I turned on you and delivered you to Schervo.”

_ Would you have? _ She almost asked, dazed as she was. He was leading her horse. And she was wounded in body and spirit. And there was no doubt anymore. “They’ll telegraph the Kaiser. There will be war.”

Samaren turned with raised brows. “Will there?”

She saw the glint in his eyes, hunger, a wolf scenting. There was a challenge in the question, an edge almost of mockery. But sincere, also, some other option she felt herself flailing and failing to grasp. War was evisceratingly easy to imagine.  _ I shouldn’t have come, I shouldn’t have come. _

She didn’t sleep, but was lost in something like a shroud of nightmares until they reached the shelter. It was a small cave with a wooden door installed in its mouth and a natural chimney, though the firepit was cold and there was no firewood. A chamber in the back held two nervous horses. Amika came to her senses to the sound of Samaren speaking softly to one of them, making complaints in his native tongue about how its previous owners seemed to care more about horse-feed than their own. She lay on a saddle blanket in the little niche in the rock where he had put her and listened to him rummage through the Schervons’ supplies. He moved brisk and purposeful, but when he muttered to the horses – she lost track of the low Ilyigan after a while – he did not sound very much cheered.

She drifted, and when she surfaced again there was a fire from newly chopped wood. Samaren sat oiling a gun, one he’d taken from the Hyemi officer he’d finished off. As soon as Amika thought of the man his dying face was etched behind her eyelids, every shade of grey pallor and drop of sweat. She opened her eyes wide.

She must not be so affected. War was coming and thousands of young Hyemi men would die.

After a minute Samaren noticed her waking. He raised his head from the gun to her. She wondered if he would rise and come to her if she was silent. She could not risk a test. “Water, Captain, if you please…”

It was not a true plea, as they both knew. But she found it easy to cleave to what was known between them, what was set and balanced. She looked at his face in the murk of the cave and remembered him at war, just fifteen months before. The Fiend of No Nation who had haunted her all along the border, who had killed her countrymen and her fellow Guardians and the man who had made Hyem into everything it was, before Hyem chose her to remake it anew. Samaren put the gun aside and rose at her call. He lingered back a moment to blow his nose with the oil rag in obvious distaste. It made him seem very ordinary and human. She remembered what Viskinde had said,  _ hardly a man at all, _ and remembered,  _ call him what you will, but don’t call him a monster _ .

“Here.” Samaren crouched by her side but offered the canteen to her to hold and drink herself. She did so greedily, comforted by the scent of the leather – pine oil rubbed into the casing. Hyemi mountain men used the same. Schervo had been Hyem fifteen months ago. “Not too quickly or you’ll choke it all back up again.”

“How long?” she croaked between sips.

“A night. You’ve been lucid before, but with the head wound it’s no wonder you don’t remember.”

“Has anyone come?”

“Not a soul. We are alone.”

Amika pushed a flat palm against the rock. She managed to raise her upper body, but her spine felt like a teetering pile. Samaren watched her, with interest, with intent. “You’re not strong enough, Doma Amika.”

She fell back again. The hand she’d used felt icy despite her heavy gloves. She felt icy all over, campfire and all. She stared up at whirling shadows against the roof of the cave, strange visions leaping and shifting, unreadable signs.

He stood and went back to his gun. She watched him turn his back to her, could not picture the look on his face.  _ There will be war. _

“Will you leave me, Captain Samaren?” she whispered.

He didn’t respond. Didn’t sit back down, stayed still in the flickering light and shadow.

The water she’d drunk churned inside her. She put both palms to the frozen rock. “You’ve sworn an oath.”

“All the continent knows how I keep my oaths,” he said softly.

“Ranna will not take you. You killed her brother…”

“On your behest. Just as I killed Festus Detrich on hers. Need makes forgiveness easy.”

“I have not forgiven you,” she hissed. “I have  _ taken _ you.”

He turned around and stared at her, standing man to prone woman. She could not read his face with the fire at his back. But she met his eyes and held them and pushed against them, against his torn roots and all the places where his soul was a deadened scar. Reached for the link that ghosted between them where her roots fed his Centre, gave him his unmatched power. Festus Detrich’s unholy work. She sunk her claws into it.  _ You’ve turned from your land, exile, but I will not let you turn from mine. _

She didn’t know if it was enough, did not know what she held in her hands now. But he settled back down by the fire, heavily, with clear lack of intent to rise back again. He took up the gun and went back to his work. But now he glanced at her every now and again, small curious looks. They didn’t frighten her, she realized. Not when he was all she had. She closed her eyes and lay listening, listening to the fire crackle, to the wind outside, to Samaren’s working hands and very ordinary coughing. She felt no peace, but at last she truly slept.

 

~**~

 

When she woke again her head was clear. Pain lingered where she thought she’d hit it against the railcar roof, but only the bruised pain of a dull reminder. Sometime while she was sleeping her roots had realigned themselves and relaxed from their terrible knots and blind, seeking writhing. The bone-thirst remained, but now had a direction. Hyem. Home. The people she had to reach before war did.

The horses were still inside, so at first she startled to find Samaren gone. But as she sat up seeking, the sounds of an axe striking firewood and a rasping cough just outside the cave mouth told all. She decided not to call him just yet, this time. She could use the moment to think with clarity.

The railhead, the bridge.  _ Does Ranna Vandavern want war? In this season?  _ Not between Schervo and Hyem. The Eisenhorn kept that door firmly shut.

But someone had destroyed the railhead and killed the men who had come to investigate. Someone had blown up the bridge with her on it. Left her trapped in the borderland, cut off from her Guardians back at the heart of her country, along its borders…

It struck her suddenly, as forcefully as one of Samaren’s lightnings. “Oh,” she said, a tiny sound into the echoing cave. Then a full-throated moan, “oh, Great Sun, no.”

Samaren was at the cave mouth in a flash, shouldering his way through the door with snow in his hair and wood-axe in hand. He blinked to see no obvious source for her distress, took a moment to set the axe down and pull his thoughts away from the fighting instinct.

“What was that about?” He sounded hoarse and miserably congested. Amika’s gut twinged. She needed him at his best. She needed good fortune.

“We must find a way to send word back to Hyem,” she said without preamble. He stared, wearily blank, scrubbing a hand down his face. It was strange and unsettling, being even a step ahead of him in tactical reasoning. “There’s no time to ride back. The danger is now. This is Adalas’s doing, just as General Basholme said.”

His expression worked along with his mind, from frowning confusion to mouth pursed in sudden calculation to eyes wide with shock. “You think all this was their ploy to trap you here?”

“This border is closed in winter; the East is not. Adalas would not strike again so soon after their last defeat, but if the symbol of that defeat was gone – the ascendant Land’s Own who rose in victory – and you, her greatest weapon, with her – “

The logic seemed no less coherent when she spoke it aloud, and she could see that he followed, though with brows still knotted in thought. Measuring a lifetime of doing the unspeakable against someone else’s reasons for doing the same. “Adalan troops will suffer in Hyemi winter.”

“All the more reason for a surprise attack and a lightning victory.”

“And Miles Rittner is no fool and is a man who knows his enemies. Certainly he knows that Hyem is prepared for a rematch.”

“Yes – but prepared for such a blow as this?”

Samaren settled down, one arm wrapped around the knee pulled to his chest. He studied her closely for a moment.

“You are a great symbol, Land’s Own Guardian,” he said. “But it’s Franz the Second who rules Hyem, and Ander Kirschen who commands its armies. You are not Festus Detrich.”

Whether he meant it as a sting or not, it smarted. Amika’s cheeks heated against the cold.  _ Adalas had not feared Festus Detrich _ , she wanted to say, but that was a scrubbed truth. Adalas had feared him well, before he’d been eclipsed.

“Is this your strategic judgement, or are you simply tired and ill and wish to lie low?” she challenged. Now it was his turn to show fire, though his showed only in the steel of his eyes. He needed to say little more. She knew the faith of his Centre; he knew that she knew what she was challenging.

“So there will be war,” he said after a while. His voice was flat, and his eyes still glinted. “What do you propose we do?”

Amika exhaled. “The bridge is destroyed. There is no telegraph line.”

“There are the signal towers on the peak above the railhead. One at least was still whole when your first messenger raised the alarm ahead of his return.”

“A limited means… but all we have.” The signal towers had still been useful in the last war. And even a sign of life from beyond the border would make a tremendous difference, she reasoned. “How long to travel, do you think?”

“That depends on how well and hard you can ride.” Now that certainly was meant as a sting, but Amika gritted her teeth and took it with a nod. She would ride as she must, since war was coming. No less than Festus Detrich, the old soldier, would have done in her place.

Within the hour they were away. Samaren had considered both horses and had given her the larger but gentler one, warning her that they would have to swap ever so often so that one horse would not bear the full load of breaking the path through the snow. He’d packed the little food the Schervons had left in their shelter and warned her also that its scarce quantity had to last. He took all the ammunition for himself, and Amika let him. She hoped not to have to fight. Not yet.

The railhead was not far, but reaching the peak was another matter entirely. They rode through daylight that was barely that, through a noon full of shadows. Amika had ridden through snowy landscapes before, but never through one so defiant in its emptiness of all human life and endeavour. There were shivering black trees and white piled high, and nothing else.

She watched Samaren’s back. He was pushing his horse with little mercy, half picking and half clearing the way as they went in uncharacteristic silence; alert, she imagined, to any troubling signs in the woods. Signs she knew she was utterly blind to. She hoped that he was able to focus, tired and ill as he was, and wondered why he didn’t curse the weather or the horses or the terrain or tell her some hair-raising story of how much worse Betairun’s winters had been, and thought that both were foolish worries but couldn’t shake them. 

At first the sky, though flatly white, was still, and Amika could think of the discomfort of the ride merely as an obstacle between her and her all-important goal. But after some hours the wind picked up, rose like a waking dragon, and pulled at, then rattled, then began snapping the branches. It struggled against their coats, but threw its needles against their faces, their eyes, their hands in vengeful promise. Amika took to breathing as shallowly as she could against the teeth that nipped inside her lungs. One of her gloves had ripped minutely in the ordeal of the bridge, and she tucked that hand against her breast even as she lost all sense of the other as anything but an extension of her horse’s reins.

Forward. Upward. How long?  _ As long and as hard as you can ride _ . Perhaps that was why Samaren was silent. To speak was to remember one was human; humans had limits.

Just before they rose above the treeline he had them swap horses. He leaned on his horse as it stood and coughed himself breathless but ignored her when she asked if she might take the lead for a while. “Show me your hand,” he told her instead, and examined her ripped glove in clipped, professional disapproval. The flesh beneath it was starting to purple, and he had her rub life into it with all her strength while he took his flask and a knife from his pack, cut away some of the flask’s wool padding and had her stuff that in her glove to close the hole. He then had her put the canteen she’d kept warm inside her coat into her pack and bluntly told her that she’d die of cold faster than thirst. Amika felt like an utter fool, but in a reassuringly resentful way.  _ I know you don’t care if the delicate frowe dies, Captain Samaren _ . She endured for her country, but she also endured to spite him.

Above the treeline the wind was a hundred times worse, and the air was growing thin. Amika’s head pounded in pain again and she felt all the more spiteful for it. They paused often though briefly to eat and drink, small measures to keep up their strength that nonetheless burned through their rations. By the fourth horse-swap Amika’s legs nearly buckled under her when she dismounted and Samaren barely caught her elbow to stop her collapse. She felt him waver under her weight before she found enough feeling in her feet to stand on her own.

For a moment they looked at each other. She realized that he was waiting for her to say enough; realized that she was waiting for him to do the same.

“Onward, then,” she said.

He nodded, just once. “Onward.”

 

The peak still seemed impossibly far when the wind conjured up a whole bank of cloud, travelling, flooding the far valleys and grasping for the peaks. On one step they were just starting up a slope towards a cluster of rocks that might offer shelter, in the next step, slope, rocks and all were gone. White above, white below. Amika blinked until her eyes ran with swiftly freezing tears, but she could just barely make out Samaren on his horse right next to her. He stopped, and she felt what little of her skin wasn’t numb prickle with the presence of his power as he spread it in the fog, feeling the landscape through it. Then he dug his heels into the horse’s side again and moved on, led by that other sense, leaving her no choice but to follow blindly.

No choice. He could have led her into Schervo. He could have led her off a cliff. She said nothing. She followed.

It felt like a dream; it felt like hours. Quickly she learned that her horse could stick by its mate without her guidance. She closed her eyes and the black behind her eyelids was grey with the shadow of whiteness. She breathed in the fog and imagined she could taste Samaren’s crackling, vicious power in it.  _ Am I going to the peak? Or am I going to die?  _ But fortune favoured the bold.

“I can’t hold it!” Samaren spoke suddenly. Though the horses were side by side, the wind forced him to raise his voice. She couldn’t see his face clearly even at this distance. But she could feel his eyes on her. “I’ve no range to navigate with the fog roiling like this! We stop for today!”

“You can blow the fog away, surely!” she shouted back.

“If I call a harder wind it’ll blow us away with the fog!”

“What’s the use of your power if not for this!”

“I fight men, doma, not nature herself.” His voice, a raw note in it, dropped until she could barely catch the words. Then he raised it again. “It’s your turn! Use your power to find us shelter!”

“What - how?!”

“I need a solid snowbank to dig into – feel for it!”

_ Feel for it _ . In Hyem it would have been trivial. But here was a borderland, where her roots had little if any purchase, where opening herself seemed to lead her only into a cold void. Every limb and organ of her body was clamouring for her to focus on its suffering rather than throw herself into a task that promised only soul-pain instead.  _ What does he think a Land’s Own Guardian can do?! _

_ What do  _ **_I_ ** _ think I can do? _

What she could not do was confess herself helpless. Not to him. She needed him enough already. Sliding off her horse, she sank in snow up to her knees, but under that there was earth. It had been Hyem once, and still spoke a language she knew. She called Ranna Vandavern’s advice, of all things, to mind –  _ reach past yourself, find where there is more to you than what you are alone  _ – and gradually worked to shed it, every agony of the body, until she was only the soul that gathered her roots. Then she inched her awareness along them, a thin thread upon a high wire, the abyss of separation and yearning on all sides. She probed this place through the ghost-memory of souls whose own roots had once lain tangled with hers.

Sunk deeply enough to barely feel the cold, she began to walk.

Like a dream. Like hours. But it must have been a short enough time that when she came to herself she still had feeling in her feet. She felt Samaren’s fog-sense spread out again when she stopped, ready to guide him after she had finished.

“There.”

She pointed, and Samaren went to work without delay and without question, using a snow-pick salvaged from the cave. Amika stood by her horse, the poor beast’s body between her and the wind, and breathed in the magnificence of her deed. Her grip on the sense of the borderland had slipped as soon as she had let it, leaving just the pain she had expected in its wake. She was nauseous and shivering as much with the aftermath of panic as with cold. But it was done, and well done.  _ Do you think I will die now, Captain? _

Unable to offer him assistance in building the shelter, she turned to tending to the horses, tethering and feed the beasts who were just as weary as their riders. They looked at her with guileless, trusting eyes. Samaren hardly looked at her at all; as soon as the shelter was done he crawled in and offered her no help in following. She went inside to find him unfolding his bedroll over the packed snow, to settle on it boneless with exhaustion. Little for her to do but to follow that example, with some awkward shifting and moving inside the tiny space. They were close enough that they could not help but brush up against each other; she cringed at it, but he seemed to care only as much as he tried not to cough near her. 

In such close quarters, even the murk of the cave could not hide that his eyes were overbright, that he was flushed with more than exertion. “You’re feverish,” she said quietly. 

Samaren shrugged where he lay. “Not badly.”

“Now will you rest as you were told?”

“No. I need to make sure that snow doesn’t block the entrance, and that nothing eats the horses.”

“What could be coming, here and now?”

As soon as she said it, they both heard the scratching.

“Oh, well  _ done _ , doma,” Samaren said under his breath. Amika froze with her heart in her throat. There was a mass somewhere on top of the snowbank, the shelter. More than quite hearing its movement, they felt the press of its weight against the air.  _ Big _ , that press said.

Swift and silent, Samaren unclipped his chain-whip from his side and crept to the entrance, maneuvering Amika behind him. She didn’t protest, though she kept an eye on the gun he’d left on the bedroll. The thing on the roof shifted, padded about.

“Is it a bear?” she whispered.

“I thought so, but…”

“It’s too large for a wolf…”

“The horses,” Samaren muttered. “Why are the horses silent?”

As soon as he said it, Amika realized: no whinnying, no screaming, no panicked straining at the tether. Just the scraping, the pacing, up over their heads.

“It wants us.”

“The horses are  _ right there _ .”

“Captain – ”

“Stay inside. I’m going to kill it.”

He spoke with the absolute confidence of a man who had never encountered a problem he couldn’t kill. But Amika’s flesh continued to crawl, a burst of inching feeling with every turn on the roof. The pressure seemed to shift, to billow out with a rhythm like breath.  _ It wants us. It knows who we are. _

“It would have taken a horse already if it meant to. Captain, don’t.”

“And what, doma – leave it to dig its way in?”

“It’s not a bear.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.” That was the worst of it.

Samaren stayed put for a long, long minute, taut with the unspeakable tension of a bowstring on a desperate shot. The sounds never changed direction, never moved off the mound of their shelter. Amika felt Samaren’s breathing, her own, match the beats of the ebb and flow of pressure in the tiny space. Something in her mind kicked to be free of the terror and surface as a coherent thought.  _ An animal, a wild animal… _

With a foul word in his own tongue, Samaren snapped. He left the shelter in a surge of summoned wind, blowing ice into the face of the thing above, to give himself the crucial moment to straighten, turn, and face it. But instead of the whistle of his weapon at work, Amika heard only silence. Then another curse, twice as foul as before.

“There is nothing there,” Samaren said in low, resentful amazement as she crept out to join him. “Not even prints. Look.”

The fog had thinned just enough to let her see the top of the snowbank, utterly smooth. The horses on their tethers calmly chewed the scarce offerings inside their nosebags. Nothing stirred.

She looked at Samaren. His answering look was just as lost.

“I imagine they tell stories of snow ghosts in Betairun,” she said very quietly.

Samaren seemed to actually consider it. “What does a Betairish ghost want in Schervo?”

_ Us.  _ Why was she so sure of it? “You were right. We cannot rest. We shall take shifts.”

“Don’t bother, doma.” Samaren’s eyes were fixed on the snowbank. He had not put his chain-whip away. “While this fog lasts, I mean to watch through it. I won’t sleep and wait for you to hear it on top of us again.”

Amika opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. She could not command him, and she would not persuade him. He wanted his kill, would hear nothing of his worsening illness, and he only ever followed her as he pleased.

“Very well. I leave it to you.” He nodded distracted approval to that. She lingered another moment before turning back to the shelter. “Still. I am not wholly powerless here, Captain. Wake me if I am needed.” But she knew already that her sleep would be at least undisturbed, if not sound.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You were afraid! Afraid that your body is failing, and your luck is running out – “

Amika’s dreams were full of horrors she imagined were Betairish ghosts, but nothing else stirred until she woke early in the next day. The wind had died down and the fog had lifted, but snow was falling, the still-far peak was invisible in a higher mist, and by noon they had few rations and the horses none at all.

“I thought you meant for us to conserve those?” she asked Samaren in honest confusion when he took the last piece of salted meat from his pack. He ate rather more than her, but she’d thought it more than fair until now.

“I did when I thought they were all we’d have. But I sent my storm far last night, once the wind calmed.” He pointed up and into the distance. “There is a homestead beyond that ridge.”

Her confusion actually lasted another minute, fool that she was. “A borderlander homestead? They will not give us charity. I doubt they would even trade.”

“I said nothing of charity or trade.”

The one thing she could say to Samaren’s credit was that he sounded nonchalant. He didn’t even mock her misunderstanding, or her flaring outrage. And that was not much credit at all. “You mean to pillage these people. Innocent farmers, in the middle of winter.”

“I mean not to starve to death. They’re only borderlanders.”

“Some words from an exile!” With that she had his certain attention. He turned in the saddle to scowl at her. “You will do no such thing. I forbid it.”

“Then I disobey.”

“Are you my man, Captain?”

He looked at her sidelong. “I am the man keeping you alive, doma.”

That silenced her. She stared up at the ridge. A homestead likely meant a family, a man and his women and children.  _ Only a handful of borderlanders. All Hyem will soon be at war _ . “Let me try to speak with them first. If I cannot arrange something with them, you may do what you must.”

Samaren’s eyes glinted at that  _ may _ , but he nodded.

She racked her brain all the way to the ridge. What could a Land’s Own Guardian say to a family of borderlanders? Newly made borderlanders at that, who had either turned from a new regime but would not return to the old, or who had lived in these mountains for generations, roots tangled with the Eisenhorn so much more closely than with the souls of either Schervo or Hyem. Neither she nor Samaren had one single thing these people could want. But no question that they needed the supplies. Perhaps if they had preserved the food better, but too late now – she had trusted him on that front, but he had made his own plans and calculations – those of a man at war, which was everything he had ever been, and was this not why she had taken him? She watched the Rogue Guardian’s back in silence as they rode on. The sleepless night – when had he last slept? – had done him no favours. He sat his mount hunched against the cold and coughed constantly, wet and wheezing. She wondered if she could overpower him.

Of course not. He was Saul Samaren. And he was the man keeping her alive. All there was for her to do was follow.

They passed over the ridge to find the homestead large, likely a generational hold. Not a living soul in the rectangular courtyard between buildings, but she could hear working voices inside, a man gruffly scolding his livestock and a woman singing over her spinning. Samaren stopped at the gate. “Go speak with them, then,” he told her. “I’ll see if there is something to take without them aware.”

_ Like a common thief.  _ But she didn’t say it. It was a much kinder option than the chances of them confronting him. She expected a dog to bark or goat to bleat when she opened the gate, but heard nothing. There were no bandits in the Eisenhorn in winter. Men huddled indoors or died.

Her knock on the door of the cowshed was answered by a tall, burly man whose beard nearly covered his belt, rough-spun clothes, squinting eyes, craggy brow, a pitchfork in hand still strung with hay. He looked like the painting of a borderlander in one of her childhood books. Fifteen months ago, he had been Hyemi.

She decided against a curtsy. “Good day, fro. I am very sorry, but I must ask for your help.”

He blinked at her with a flicker of wonder – she saw herself through his eyes – a young female stranger of noble beauty and bearing, appearing out of the heart of winter alone and unannounced. Did he even think she was real? She pressed on, hurried despite herself. “My companion and I travel to Shcervo, but we have had an accident and lost most our supplies. We have little of value to trade with, but – “

“To Schervo?” The man’s question was a grunt, half aimed past her entirely. But his old eyes narrowed a little in scrutiny. “Going in this season?”

“It’s a matter of some urgency.”

“No flatlanders coming up here in winter.” He used an archaic word even she barely recognized. It had a faint dismissive snort in it.

Amika duly bowed her head. “We were unprepared for the difficulty. We are at the mercy of your kindness.”

“You’re the same age as my daughter,” the man mumbled, the sound of a voice chronically underused. “At her husband’s hold, my daughter, baby’s coming. Son’s gone down. Down to Hyem. Couldn’t stick it…” he blinked again. “Said you had an accident?”

A flash of inspiration came. “A bear came in the night and took our packhorse.”

“A bear…” another mutter, distance and thought in the man’s face. He put a large hand up on the doorframe. The shed behind him smelled of cows and was warm with their many large bodies. Amika could see them shift and turn to look, understanding nothing, but sensing much.

“I know you,” the man said abruptly. His eyes rounded and focused with the sharp clarity of winter ice. “You’re the Lord Regent’s girl. The Land’s Own now.”

The same ice started creeping along Amika’s guts. All Hyem knew her name – had to know – but this borderlander on his mountain, where had he seen her face to put a name to? “You must be mistaken. I am nothing so – “

“Said you might come this way…” The mumbling, still. Not for her. The man moved a step forward, into the snow, into her space as she moved back. The ice of the courtyard was slippery. He turned the grip of the pitchfork in his hand. “Going to Schervo, he said…”

“Who? Who said?”

“Should take you in, he’d want you…” He turned the pitchfork again. His eyes were on her face. “Same age as my daughter…”

“You ‘should’ do nothing, fro,” Amika whispered. He was close enough to hear a whisper now. “You are a mountain man of the Eisenhorn. You obey none but your own will.”

It stopped him, a sure stop, even scarce inches away. She saw him struggle. If she tried to run or fight the struggle would be decided. If she stood, patience - 

A woman’s gasp sounded behind her. The man’s gaze snapped to it, and Amika risked a turn. Samaren was exiting back into the courtyard from one of the other buildings, leading what was no doubt the man’s wife, not at gunpoint but very much by force of silent threat. Amika’s heart raced. Had the woman caught him thieving, or had he taken her as a hostage of precaution, in foresight of just this scene? Either way, the borderlander man snarled with alarm at the sight. He hefted his pitchfork up to a two-handed grip, not the grip of a farmer.

“Know you too,” he spat. “Rogue Guardian.”

Samaren looked only briefly surprised. “So I am.”

“You step away from her.”

“You first, if you will.”

“Don’t order me on my own land. Exile dog. You don’t look so good to scare me.”

“Don’t try me, domé.” Samaren’s voice was low, half honest warning, half soft mockery.

The man’s eyes burned. His wife hissed through gritted teeth, raised an arm towards him. “Don’t do it, Esak,” she said, not so much in a plea as in anger of her own. His moment’s attention on her was all that Amika needed to finally find her balance again, to slip, much quicker than she knew herself able since she’d left behind her soldier days, out of the shadow and range of the pitchfork. To Samaren’s side. When the man realized she was gone his arms dropped, the blades of his weapon turned earthward. The next moment. Samaren nodded his wife over to join him.

No shots. No blood. No death.

Amika exhaled.

She raised both arms, palms out towards the glaring, wary couple. “You see that we mean no harm. We need little, only to complete our errand. You know who I am,” she decided not to risk pressing the question of  _ how _ , “and that you will be repaid.”

“What errand?” the woman challenged. “When will you repay? In spring?”

“Within days if I am permitted, good frowe. We must get to the signal tower above the railhead. We bear warning to Hyem of coming war.”

The man huffed. “Hyem is at war every year.”

“I will not have it so.” Was this how they thought of what had once been their country? Amika drew herself erect. “I work now to make a new Hyem. But this is a treacherous surprise attack. A warning will end it swiftly.”

The couple exchanged glances. “Marek went to Hyem,” the man said quietly.

The woman hissed again. “Rot that boy! This is his home, not the flatland. What’s Hyem to us? We’re borderlanders now.” She turned her back on all of them, crossed her arms about herself as she looked to the house. “Let a war drive him home.”

The man lingered no more than a moment longer. “Go,” he told them flatly. The pitchfork rose in his hand again. “She’s right. Rot Hyem, it does nothing but take.”

Amika’s stomach tightened. In her mind’s eye she saw the dead soldiers; under her ribs, bitter heat rose. “We will die in the snow, Fro Esak.”

“Turn back. Find another stead. You get nothing from me.”

“My man wished to kill you and take what we will. Asking was a mercy.”

The borderlander snorted. “A Hyemi sort of mercy.”

“Please.” She could feel Samaren at her back – strangely still, waiting. And she could feel the heat boil into her own breast. “I am Land’s Own Guardian, and I beg.”

“Not my land or my Guardian, woman.” He, too, turned his back to her.

Amika did not think of what she did next. It rose out of her and she rose with it, buoyed on fury and need. She knew how to reach into this earth already, and now she reached through it into the souls that were rooted therein. Felt for the vestiges, the filaments paling with a year’s distance where a sure link through had once been. Fifteen months ago they had been Hyemi. There was still just enough there to carry her will.

She poured her presence into them. The proud borderlander knees buckled and bent.

She walked around so she could see their faces where they knelt frozen. No defiance there; only baffled terror. “We will take only what we need,” she told them coldly.  _ This is a mercy.  _ “But take we must. If there is no war, know you have played your part.” At this she felt them begin to struggle again, the woman’s soul first, then her husband’s. But the struggles were feeble for now. They had not imagined that she could or would do this to them.

Now Samaren came up beside her, looking on with genuine awe. “How long can you hold them?”

“As long as I must.” She did not know what the true answer was, but trusted him to understand.

“Very good, then. I’ll be quick.” He went off without as much as a breath of a suggestion that they would be more easily handled dead. She thought she didn’t know why, but then realized she very much did. The subtle pleasure in his amazement told all.

He went to work, and at first she listened to him move through the homestead. But soon all she could focus on was the press of the couple’s souls striving to rise. Their rage, their humiliation at being forced to their knees in their own home by a woman they considered a coddled flatland foreigner. Had either of them been a Guardian she thought it might have broken their faiths and Centres. Their hate was fiery and fierce and in the face of it all she could do was cling to her own fury, the knowledge of bitter necessity. None of this need have happened. But now that it had, regret would doom her where she stood.

Samaren was as quick as he’d promised. But by the time he’d returned with packs full Amika’s headache had returned with a vengeance. The fight to keep the two down no longer felt spiritual but physical. She had closed her eyes to focus, and when she heard him come up to her she almost reached out to brace herself against him. Her hand went up. She nearly joined them in kneeling.

“Let go now,” Samaren said in her ear.

She did, and the next moment she heard his weapon meet flesh.

The woman howled, began to scream like the dying horse had by the demolished bridge. Amika opened her eyes to a vision of red and white. Samaren had plunged the long blade of his chain-whip into the man’s throat and up through his skull, an instant but hideous death. He hadn’t touched the woman. She saw that he didn’t need to. She was clinging to her husband’s corpse and shrieking all breath out of her body.

Amika could only wish she was as shocked now as she had been after the explosion. She saw everything with total clarity. The butchery. The need. Her part.

“Enough,” Samaren said. He was holding the reins of two fresh horses, keeping them still as they tried to retreat from the blood. She climbed into a saddle and pressed her heels into the horse’s side. There was nothing here, no kindness or recompense that the woman would take. She kept her control, hands steady on the reins, until they were riding out the gate again.

Then she whirled on him. “There was no need to kill that man!”

Samaren was ashen pale and shaking with suppressed coughs. He glared at her defiance. “Would you rather he hunted us all the way to the peak?”

“He was on his knees!”

“And you put him there, doma!”

“You knew I didn’t want these people hurt!”

“I knew and  _ I did not care!” _ he snarled in her face, so close she could feel the heat of fever in his breath. Then he couldn’t resist any longer and fell over coughing, slumped over the neck of his horse desperate for air. Amika loomed over him, finding her own snarl.

“You were afraid! Afraid that your body is failing, and your luck is running out – “

Hoofbeats on snow drew her up. She raised her gaze to the distance and he managed to follow suit. A group of horsemen was coming, all in the patchwork gear of the borderland farmers, and a shout rose from them as they spotted her and Samaren at the gate. Not a shout to halt or to talk. Two had rifles, the others had pitchforks, spears, butchering knives.

_ Said you’d come this way _ . Amika recalled the words with a jolt. “Someone knew we’d be here,” she blurted out. She could see the coming battle already. If Samaren’s luck held he’d slaughter every one of these unprepared farmers. If it didn’t…

She yanked her horse around, kicked it furiously and sent it into headlong flight away from the riders. Samaren tried to shout after her but managed only a croak, and was forced to follow in a hurry. They sped over the open snow, nothing to take cover behind, nowhere to hide. The farmers were better riders in their own land. The edge of the headlong start was already shrinking.

Bullets sizzled past them, inexpertly fired from horseback. But all too quickly the best – or most foolhardy – of the men was nipping at Samaren’s heels. He tried for another gunshot, missed, and Samaren gave a brutal pull at the reins to turn his horse so that he and the borderlander nearly collided. His weapon was still to hand and it flashed only once. The man tumbled gurgling to the snow, laid open from throat to groin.

One less. But even the Fiend of No Nation could not use a farm-trained beast like a warhorse. Samaren’s mount reared and leapt at the blood and the shouts of the dying man’s fellows and would not calm. He swore and cuffed it with the chain of his blade and finally gave it up and slipped from the saddle. Over her shoulder Amika saw him roll and come up standing. The other riders were nearly around him. She did not think that it was a sacrifice for her sake. But she could make it so, if she rode on. Leave him to his battle, win or lose, and press on to the peak. He would not care one whit if she did. What was between them was not loyalty.

_ I have taken you. I will not so easily let you go. _

She pulled on the reins. Her horse was reluctant to slow and even more reluctant to turn, but of all the skills she lacked, riding was not one. She looked back to the throng. The men were circling like wary hunters about a snapping wolf, forced to stay outside the reach of Samaren’s whirling chain-whip, much longer than any of their weapons. All but the single remaining rifleman.

That rider was pulling back from the others. From a distance it was clear, but she didn’t know if Samaren saw it from within the crowd of attackers. To the farmers he was obviously terrifying. But to her eyes, who knew him, he was breathless and dizzy and slow.

The borderlander cocked his gun.

Amika had run out of time to think. She shouted: “ _ Saul! _ ”

It was his name, she’d later be certain, his given name, that she could not imagine another soul had used in years and decades. It snapped him to instant full attention just as the borderlander pulled the trigger. The man’s fellows had moved to clear a path for the shot – with that it dawned on Amika that this was a practiced manoeuvre, they had  _ known  _ – and then the wind exploded.

The storm-wind. His storm-wind. A gust of blinding power and speed that ripped packed snow from the ground and hurled men clean off horseback. The fiercest she had ever seen him call. But to sweep a bullet from its path at this range, even such power would need a god’s own luck.

When the swirling snow settled and she could see, Samaren was still standing.

Not for long; a moment later he went to one knee, a hand at his neck where the shot had punctured his coat and had come close enough to nick the skin. But the farmers as they pulled themselves up were staring and muttering, afraid to approach him even as he panted and swayed with the effort of that grand summoning. Amika knew exactly what they were saying. What they were seeing.  _ He can’t be killed. He’s a monster. He’s a god. _

_ No. He’s a weapon. He’s  _ **_my_ ** _ weapon.  _

With a yell of outrage, she struck the flank of her horse and at last sent it speeding back, barrelling right at the man with the rifle.

He wasn’t ready for her. He tried to scramble for another shot but never got as far as aiming. As she passed him she  _ pushed _ \- the same cold blaze she had sent into the couple in the homestead - and he tumbled off and under the hooves of his own spooking mount. She heard the snap of the gun’s wooden handle and then the crack of a large bone, but didn’t stop to see what had become of him. The man’s fellows all glanced back in shock as she eased her horse back around.

And now Samaren rose to his feet again.

He could have ended it in a split-second. Frozen them with his winds. Felled them with his lightning. Weak and weary as he was, it would have been wiser. But she had called him a coward to his face. Had challenged him to test the faith of his Centre, and test it, she knew, he would.

His power was reined tightly inwards. He dropped his chain-whip and pulled a knife from one boot. He went at eight armed men with ten inches of steel and all the terror of his luck and his boldness.

She stayed back and watched, as she knew he wanted her to. It was not an easy battle. Made daring in their panic, they came at him from all directions, using the range advantage he’d let them regain. He had to keep moving, dodging by milliseconds, looking for quick opportunities. And they fell. One man with a punctured gut, another with a slit throat, a third scrabbling at blood bursting from his thigh, one skewered on the pitchfork of another who then dropped the weapon in horror and froze where he stood, easy prey. One by one they fell, not quickly, not gracefully. When Samaren was well and strong he danced. Now he just worked like a butcher.

He was down to two desperate foes when one of them made a break for it, dashing to grab one of the horses that had put a good distance between themselves and the battle. Amika tried to ride at him, but no blow or kick she could muster would convince her own beast to come near the action again, and by the time she dismounted the man was on horseback with the long handle of a broken-off spear in his hand. He rode down just as Samaren slashed the eyes from the head of his last comrade. The handle, carrying all the momentum of horse and rider, struck the Rogue Guardian across the back and sent him toppling into the snow.

The rider didn’t linger to reap the reward of that blow. He cantered away back towards the homestead. Samaren pulled himself up with hissing effort, knife still in hand, raised that hand for a hopeless throw –

Amika dropped to her knees by his side. His hand fell again. He braced heavily against her arm as he rose.

She started to pull away. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said, and promptly fell back against her as soon as she broke contact. “Dizzy.” Between his inflamed lungs and the shock of the blow, all he could manage were short shallow gasps. He leaned the bulk of his weight on her until they got near her shying horse. With some last reserve of will, he pulled himself up to grab the animal and mount it, then collapsed across its back, trembling all over as he fought to stay in the saddle, to breathe.

It was not a fight Amika cared to watch. She went between the corpses and the curled-up dying men, picked up his discarded pack and chain-whip, and, after a thought, a handful of bullets from the gunman who’d died under the hooves of his own horse. They were of Hyemi make and might suit Samaren’s salvaged gun. These men had been Hyemi. Now they were her enemies, her dead enemies.

Now was not the time nor place to wonder. Snow was starting again, and it was well past midday. Most of the horses had fled, but two still skittered around in confusion and fear. She took her time coaxing one of them. By the time she was mounted Samaren was sitting up straighter, but didn’t protest when she handed him only his weapon and kept his pack. She thought at first that he simply didn’t have the strength or air to argue just yet.

He was still silent when she turned her horse and took the lead.

The peak loomed in Amika’s sight as she led them across the snowfield. It looked different from the lead horse clearing the way; much larger, but much further. It did not look like they could reach it by nightfall. She rode, and in the silence where only the wind spoke, the seconds and minutes descended on her like the falling flakes, weightless until they were piled. The borderlander who was slaughtered on his knees, where she had put him, and his wife clinging to his corpse. The eyeless man they had left behind still howling in the snow. The rifleman she’d pushed under the hooves of his own horse. They were leaving a trail of corpses behind them, and she saw her path over each of them clearly. She hoped that the rider who had escaped would make it to the homestead, and hoped he died and couldn’t call anyone else to block that path.

Whatever it took to end this swiftly.  _ If I could end it here… _

She glanced back to Samaren. His eyes were glassy, half-lidded, but he was watching her with every step as he followed behind, watching her break way for them both.  _ He is a man. My man.  _ And she remembered that humans had limits.

Not half a mile later she saw the hut, rising black from the blazing whiteness everywhere, sheltered in the protection of a jut of rocks. A shepherd’s cottage made from the mountain’s grey stone. Perhaps it belonged to Esak and his wife. Her horse saw it, too, and the animal shed besides it. It needed only the gentlest guidance from her to change its course in that direction.

“Tired, doma?” Samaren asked as he rode up alongside. He sounded surprised and suspicious. She decided not to honour him with an answer.

She did not say a word when he moved to help her tether the horses in the shed. But she marked every bit of effort that the routine actions cost him. His hands shook with it. He seemed to be standing on the sheer conviction that he would not, maybe dared not fall. The hut was shut against wandering animals, and entering they found it very cold, but clean and stocked with some firewood. There was a cot bed with a sheepskin cover and a fireplace with an iron kettle. Very little, but for now, Amika judged it enough.

Samaren took one look at the bed and turned his back to it. He watched as she knelt by the fireplace with her tinderbox. “It’s early to be stopping.”

“We will not find better shelter,” she answered evenly. “I need to think. Those were trained men.”

“No more than any borderland militia.”

“They knew we would be coming.”

“Did they?” That sharpened him again, or made him wrench himself achingly into sharpness. “The man at the homestead too?”

“He recognized you. And me. Someone would want me, he said…” The fire bloomed under her hands. She breathed deep of air that didn’t bite inside her throat. “Our enemy must have agents among those people. Perhaps in Schervo also. A rider got away; more may find us on the road.”

“I can deal with more.”

“Can you?”

She rose from the fireside and stood inches from him in the small space of the hut, tilted her head up to meet his gaze. His mouth was a tight line of unbudging anger. She could not tell what he was struggling harder with, his temper or his weakness. “I said I need to think, not simply race on. The peak is much further than I expected.”

“I can redraw the map and find another path. Longer, but they won’t know we’ve chosen it.”

“Something is tracking us.” Yes, she was surer than ever now. No tracks on the snowbank… “It will track us to another path.”

“Not once I catch and kill it.”

“Along with more farmer militia?”

The frustration in the sound he made was pained. He looked like he wanted to grab and shake her. “I’ll ride myself. Without you to protect I can be much faster. I’ll make the peak and if any man tracks me I shall carve his master’s name out of him.”

“I forbid it.”

“Then I disobe-“

She slapped him.

“No, you don’t,” she hissed, as he turned his face back to her with wide eyes, too shocked to answer violence with violence. “Not this time, Captain. War is coming to Hyem, and you are my guide, my protector, and my greatest weapon. And you have not slept in days, and your little cold is by every sign becoming pneumatic fever. No. You will stay here, and you will rest, ‘til I am satisfied that you are fit to serve me. And you will count yourself exceptionally privileged to have a Land’s Own Guardian for your nurse.”

He did not move as she spoke, nor pick up his jaw from the stunned gape her blow had left him in. As an encore, she billowed up through the thin cord of their link, bore her presence down upon his with all the unknown power she had found in this borderland.

His knees buckled and he dropped heavily onto the bed.

“I do not run from battle,” he said, voice high and threaded with hairline cracks. “Fortune favours the bold.”

Amika dared not pause. “A good sleep in the deep wilderness, flouting your enemies all about you, seems to me as bold as anything.”

She had to hold his eyes for a hot moment longer, but in the end Samaren breathed in and lowered his gaze. He blew the air out again at length, the exhale steadying even as it rasped in his throat. She saw the cracks close all through his Centre. She had spoken well. When he nodded acquiescence, it was as good as a salute.

As he leaned to undo his boots, she reached down and swept her fingers through the hair matted dark gold with fever-sweat to his brow. He paused, and his head fell just a fraction, a touch, into her cool fingers.  _ My great weapon. _ She rested so much on a man wrestling with the only thing in the world that frightened him. “Rest, my captain. I need all your power.”

“Your command, my lady.”  _ Meine frowe _ , he said. The honorific in her own language, not his. He had never addressed her in her native title this way. He had never bent so to her will.

Thinking of sparing him some dignity as he got into bed, she went outside to fill the kettle with snow. The flakes were falling fast now, and she could see little in the distance, the path up to the hut or the sloping mountainside above it. Up there, she thought she saw the silhouette of a bear, but it might have been a ghost.

When she returned he was under the sheepskin cover, shivering with chills, but fast asleep. She stoked the fire and set to watch her turn.

Samaren slept through the evening and night, and for half the next day, almost twenty-four hours. For a long time It was a fitful sleep, full of tossing and turning, of delirious mumbles in his native tongue. She sat by the side of the cot, pressed into a corner cocooned in her coat and bedroll, and listened closely, but could not untangle any secret nightmare, confession or trust from the words. Mostly she thought they were fragments of prayer.

Now and then she brushed a cloth soaked with snowmelt over his face, or roused him when his breathing grew too strained for her liking. Careful - knowing perfectly well that however weak he was, she was still waking a man of terrifying power into confusion and pain. But he was pliant in those moments, easily urged to sit up, to drink as she held the cup to his lips. Saying little, content to drift back off as soon as she allowed it, hardly caring that she had no real knowledge of nursing. The water and fleeting relief of the cool touch seemed enough. 

The fire was burning high; the air was soft with warmth and steam. There was nothing more she could do but remember what and who he was, and trust in that. She turned her thoughts away. 

She thought of the borderland instead. Hyem. Schervo. Adalas. She took a coal from the firepit, swept a slab of the stone floor and redrew the map from her own memory, a great deal of which was sense-memory, echoes that the land itself emanated into her now she had learned to listen to them. She wondered what it had felt like for Festus Detrich to lose Schervo. It had been the shock of Ranna Vandavern’s ascension that had dealt the final blow to him, made him weak enough to fall by Samaren’s blade. Schervo’s new Land’s Own had wanted him dead to spare her new country a much longer war. But it had been too late even then. The split between the two countries had happened. If only Detrich hadn’t fought that inevitability – no – if Ranna had not been certain, with good reason, that Detrich would fight –

Was Ranna following her enemy’s own logic now? War in the wake of revolution, catalysts to the growth of a long-stale people?  _ Or does she think that I threaten her as much as he had – but I built the railway. I am the new Hyem. _

The peak had to come first. One way or another, of the coming attack, she was certain, and perhaps it was no surprise that Schervo had allied itself with Adalas again – Adalas that had paid for the guns that had won its independence, that had recruited and sent the Rogue Guardian to fight at Ranna Vandavern’s side. Whatever Ranna hoped to have of the betrayal, or the borderlanders, Amika would know once her people had called them to account. But for the peak, and their unknown enemies… a riddle floated back up, a memory.  _ A wild animal’s work, Viskinde had said. A wild bear that takes no horses and leaves no tracks… _

She raised her head from the map sometimes in the very early dawn, realizing that Samaren’s sleep had calmed and deepened. Given time to do its work at last, his Guardian’s strength had quickly broken the fever, just as she might have known it would. But as she leaned back at last and closed her eyes, letting her own exhaustion claim her, she hoped he would not resent her saying a thankful prayer of her own faith. 

It was past midday when she woke. He was still just as deeply asleep, so she took his gun and went outside.

The day was clear, a skyful of clouds all turned into piled snow. The horses greeted her with hungry interest. She refilled their nosebags – Samaren’s looting had been conscientious in its priorities, at least – and noted that they seemed in good calm spirits, as though they too had slept uninterrupted. No tracks about the hut, for all that told. At last she took stock of the ammunition to her satisfaction, hung an old rake from the shed with a spare nosebag and stuck it deep in the snow, and began to shoot.

Her first shot disturbed nothing but the horses, and even they only perked their ears in mild curiosity she tried not to read as judgement. Her second sent a splash of snow up against the rake, which she supposed was a good statement of intent. She raised the gun – it was considerably heavier than it looked – and lingered, squinting, on the third.

“I thought you did not miss being a soldier, doma.”

She lowered the barrel with a frown and looked back to find Samaren in the hut’s open door, studying her with lively interest. His voice was a croak, and he braced himself on the doorway, but his eyes were clear. Suit him to get out of bed just to needle her. She went back to her aim. “Should you be up, Captain?”

“No. But I heard gunfire.” He sounded more entertained than displeased, so she declined to feel sheepish. “Can you use this at all?”

“I handled them a little last summer. Perhaps it will come back to me. You will not refuse me playing my part in our protection, I should think.” Her back stiffened expecting his response, but rather than answer he sneezed as loudly as any gunshot, which perhaps made him reconsider his objections.

Instead he left the doorway and came to her side, close to her side – before she could protest they were touching, him shadowing her stance, nudging her arms and legs with his. He guided her to plant her feet wider, move her arms higher, leaned his head next to hers so he could follow her gaze down the sight. “Here,” he murmured. “Like so.”

With any other man Amika would have blushed. Now she only felt the strength and stability, the potential in the set of her own muscles. She pulled the trigger. The shot blew the rake’s head clean off its handle.

“Very good, for a start.” Samaren drew back, leaving her to stay the stance on her own, shoulders tense with the recoil, feet steady on the ground. He still sounded amused. But the sound was edging into warmth of all things. “You might make a soldier after all.

Amika lowered the gun against her hip. “Go back to bed, Captain Samaren.”

There was that glint in his eye, but he obeyed without question, disappearing back inside the hut. She lingered a long while before she joined him, measuring the distance against the decapitated rake stuck strange and lonely in the blank snow.

“How are you feeling?” she asked when she came back inside to find Samaren digging through a pack for his looted breakfast. By way of reply he pulled out a clean handkerchief - she’d been wryly amused to learn he’d looted a handful of those, also - and blew his nose at alarming length, then groaned.

“Gah – like I’ve breathed in all this mountain’s worth of mud. I’m not strong. But I will not weaken – now.” A small admittance, a tip of the head, but she took it as her due. “I can ride. If you will it.”

“We do not ride quite yet,” she said as despite his assertions, he pulled his feet up to lie back in the bed again. “I’ve given some thought to our tracker while you slept. I believe that I know what it is.”

He nodded. “I think so, too.”

“A Guardian.”

“What else, doma? I don’t believe in Betairish ghosts.”

“And moreover, the Guardian who attacked our first messenger, whom Marschall Viskinde thought struck by a wild animal. General Kirschen was right. Few Uncentred men might survive a Guardian’s attack.” She gestured at the present exception, who grinned at the acknowledgement. “Unless the Guardian means to wound, not kill outright.”

Samaren’s eyes flicked to the map she’d left sketched on the stone. “Part of the trap, then? It’s quite a thing to gamble on, luring you to come out here.”

“And you. But a gamble that worked.” Viskinde had said,  _ You shouldn’t have come, Amika _ . But if she had not come, what other plans might have been set into motion? Nothing now but to prove the folly of trapping, of all people, Saul Samaren and Amika Stattenholme. “Lord Rittner is a shrewd tactician. But I doubt Davy Linde would have agreed to lend one of his Guardians for such a task.”

“Not to send to the Eisenhorn, with all Hyem between them. And our tracker is no stranger to this land.”

“So, Ranna Vandavern’s man.” A chill ran down her spine, confirming it aloud.  _ Damn you, Ranna, we were building a railway.  _ “I wonder what he has told all those poor farmers. What he might have done to force them into this design.”

Samaren offered the barest of shrugs at that. Never a question to him, why men might choose to take up arms and fall upon one another. “I’ve killed plenty of bears, but there’s no shooting a Guardian’s spirit. It will only return to its maker. We need the man.”

“Would he be nearby, do you think?”

“Not too far. The longer the tether, the fainter the power, and if he sees through its eyes, distance will blur it. Two, three miles? No more than my storm can cover.” He sat up in bed, leaning his chin on his hand in eager thought. He was getting into the spirit of it now, scenting his prey again, and she remembered that breaking and killing Guardians was his trade and his joy. “I could find any hiding place he might be in. But we cannot go about testing every shelter. We should tempt him closer to us.”

“Force the man out into the open, closer to his spirit.”

“Exactly so.”

Absently, Amika bent to fish some dried fruit from her pack. She needed to chew on food and thought at the same time. “If you covered the area with fog?”

“No telling if a spirit would care. Some track more by soul-sense. Most, even.”

“How does one fog soul-sense?”

“You tell me, Land’s Own Guardian.”

She thought he meant it merely to keep her occupied while he pondered the question, but the words were steel that struck flint somewhere inside. She bit down into a slice of dried peach and felt a flood of flavour wake in her mouth. “I shall do it. I will reach into this land and confound him at his roots.”

Samaren paused, clearly startled. He gave her a long, measuring look. Not unlike the look he’d given her when she held the farmer couple on their knees, but sharper, the kind of esteem that bordered on wariness.

“I’ve seen it done by a Land’s Own on their own soil,” he said at last. “Never in a borderland.”

Amika felt her heart pick up speed, a hard beating that felt as though it strained her body against its thick winter wrappings. “This is a new borderland. The earth remembers my people who were rooted in it. I feel the echoes of Hyem still within it, washing against the echoes of Schervo, an ebb and flow of tides. Ranna’s link to her man will be running through them. I can find it and squeeze it shut, like – like a windpipe.”

Samaren sucked in air and began to cough. She wondered if, flexing her power with it, she had sent a pulse of the mental image into him. “I will need to prepare myself, and you are still sick.”

“What about Ranna?” he croaked out. The rising of Amika’s heart froze in her chest.

“She would know.” Of course, her fellow Land’s Own would know. Ranna had come to her ascension purposefully and well readied, with all her brother’s learnings of souls and their webworks at her side. She had controlled her new power from the first instant. All Amika had known of that power in her own first weeks she had had of Ranna, everything Festus Detrich had not lived to teach. “She would feel me interfere with her Guardian and disrupt the balance of the borderland. It is the only way we can work against each other.” Unless they came face to face, of course. She still remembered that.

He gave one nod, more occupied with clearing his throat, she saw, than worrying about those implications. All part of the play of tactics to him. And a logical position, since war was already coming.

There was nothing Ranna Vandavern could do for her man from afar, even if she lent him greater strength. Schervo was so much smaller than Hyem and its Land’s Own therefore so much lesser.  _ Is this what Adalas has promised you, sister-Guardian? Power to match mine?  _ It was folly. She would end it swiftly.

“Here, then.” Ignoring her warning look, Samaren slipped from the bed to sit on the floor, legs half-crossed, leaning over her map. “First, let me see how far I can stretch my fog. I’ll learn all I can of the area and the paths we may take. You said that you need to prepare, doma, so do so. Find him, but don’t touch him just yet. Tomorrow we ride. I’ll tie your horse to mine, so you need think of nothing but your power and can take him off his guard. If we make the peak before we lure him close enough to spot, well enough; if not, just as well.”

It sounded like a fair-enough plan. Amika nodded. They would do well together, it seemed.

She was not wholly sure where to begin, so she sat for a while to watch him gather his own focus. A bit of a slow start; he opened his eyes several times, complaining that it was hard to host both a storm and a wretched cold in one’s head. After a little while, impatience outweighed her amusement at that. She went back to the pack, took out some more of the dried fruit, and brewed something not quite like tea that he accepted with disarming surprise. It did ease his coughing, and soon after he’d put the cup aside she realized that the light about the hut was changing too swiftly for sunset. The storm was coming to his call.

He stayed seated by the map, so she stretched out on the bed, a little surprised to find herself past caring about the smell of sweat or the scratching of the sheepskin’s underside. All of that faded away as she flowed deep down, slid her roots into the depths of earth she already knew . With every probing the borderland let her in deeper. It was not Hyem – she could not truly link with the souls rooted in it, only handle crassly them from the outside, push and coerce – but since it was not Hyem, she did not need to be gentle. She pushed her power to new places, new limits. The shifting tides of power from both countries grew clear in her mind bit by bit as she pictured, then mapped their flows. She shied from trying to brush against the ghost of Ranna Vandavern’s presence. If she could have touched the other woman’s soul… but that was not the power she had, and anyway it did nothing but risk discovery.

Though she worked for a while, she could not find the thread she had expected – the filament feeding Schervo’s soul-power to the Guardian through the node of his Land’s Own. It seemed Ranna’s skill at concealment was at least the match of her own at uncovering, at least for now. But she did feel eddies in the flow, tiny poolings. Most, she reasoned, were borderlander souls, drifting without roots. She did not know if they would feel her interference. 

She decided not to linger on it. If she sowed more confusion and terror among her enemy’s troops, all the better.

She opened her eyes. All was dark but for the firelight, and her body was stiff with hours of stillness. Her old headache threatened to burst into life again. Sore and irate, she was baffled into dumb blinking when she found Samaren kneeling at the bedside, offering her the cup refilled with not-quite tea after her own recipe.

“Thank you.” Politeness, steadfast friend, came to save the moment. But she still halfway-stared at him over the rim of the cup as she drank. The Rogue Guardian looked pale and ragged again with his own effort, not as much as when the fever had had him, but enough that she welcomed nightfall for both their sakes. But he also looked satisfied. Outside, she could hear the wind still raging; he’d let the storm he’d called slip its leash and hurl itself upon the world as it pleased.

“It’s done,” he said as she rose from the bed and stretched hard. “And you?”

“Yes.” There was no explaining how it was to be sunk into the borderland, but he nodded easy acknowledgement. Trust.

Both too tired for much discussion, they spent a brief time in awkward silence as, it suddenly lighted on Amika, each waited for the other to lay claim to the bed. Once she realized it, she instructed him in no uncertain terms to lie back down. “We shall take shifts,” she said, with a slightly arched brow inviting question, but he only laughed and went back under the cover. She found that she was perfectly content in her bedroll by the fire. Now that she felt some purchase within the earth beneath her, the teeth of the cold had grown blunted.

She was following the strange fire-shadows when she felt Samaren’s eyes on her, turned her head to find him raised on one elbow in the bed, his face suddenly unreadable once more. He said, “Doma Amika, when we find this Bear Guardian…”

She understood. She paused. It had been possible almost to forget. Seeing him swaying with exhaustion, shivering with fever, mumbling prayer in his sleep. Staring at her in awe and admiration. She could almost have forgotten. But she knew what he was.

“You may have him,” she said, and turned over to sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Could it have happened another way?

“He’s been watching us all night, I’d bet,” Samaren said, squinting into the white distance.

Amika joined him, shielding her eyes against the light of the pale sun reflected from the snow. Even on such a clear day it was hard to judge the jugged distance to the peak. But she could see the bear clearly. A dark speck on a ridge along the path they planned to take, easy to spot once one knew what to look for. She didn’t look long, so as not to draw suspicion.

“Two or three miles,” she mused. “We should move slowly at first, then, to let the man catch up.”

“Yes. We should pretend I’m still exhausted after last night’s storm. Perhaps that you are also unwell.”

“I’m surprised that I am well,” she confessed as they moved on to saddle the horses. “I think I draw more strength from this borderland than I had realized. There is more to a Land’s Own’s power than I knew, all this time in Hyem.”

He shrugged. “No wonder, doma. Who would have taught you otherwise?”

She neglected to answer that as Samaren tethered the horses together and she slung a pack on each. Once she was mounted, he handed her the sheepskin cover. She tried to hand it back – he was still slow, and coughed like a coal miner in the icy morning air – but he claimed that the work of breaking way through the snow would keep him warm. He watched until she had it well wrapped all around her. 

“Tie me to the saddle again,” she said. “So I can forget my body, and go as deep as I need.”

Samaren stared at her, but obeyed.

In the depth of the cover, gently rocked by her horse, led on a tether across a landscape of featureless white, Amika sank deep, deep down into soil and soul that knew her well. Schervo; Hyem; it had been different and the same, parted and joined, torn and reunited, and the Eisenhorn was seamed like a patch with old thread, resonant with language and memory and criss-crossed with the passage of peoples over time. She felt the current drift and tug in the new borderland, pulled by every Hyemi and Schevron eye who surveyed those mountains and spoke their name. Underneath that, the residue of the now pulled-out roots of those who had once lived here and called themselves Hyemi, and, in the calling, extended their belonging beyond the peaks both East and West. And further down, layer after layer, other roots that had linked other souls in other grand webs: the Scheren kingdom, the duchies of the Hyemarr clan, the confederacy of tribes that her people had been before they became a landed nation. Each had left its mark. Too faded for a human mind to read, but not for the land itself to forget.

In another life, she could have stayed there. Tracing those memories, those souls. It would have been a sweet thing to listen to their stories for as long as they cared to tell them. But she was bound by her own roots now, and in this life she was Land’s Own Guardian. And she saw what she needed to do.

It was not so different from gently sending her filaments into a human soul, tracing along a strand of memory. Just as she had done with the dying soldier, she sought the echoes of a mother-tongue. The language was the same on both sides of the border, but now she found those strands and named them:  _ Hyemi _ .  _ My people speak this. Remember my people.  _ The language, the word, the feeling of  _ mine _ floated into the soil and brightened scattered sparks within. Memories of belonging, of  _ being Hyemi _ . Some tangible: a flag, a song, a dish. Some bound with other things: a holiday, a visit to a faraway city. Some deeply private, a family tale or legacy. But every memory was a thread, and every thread she could catch and work, until they were a thick weave, a net.

In the net were things that didn’t belong. She combed for them carefully.

Some were simple living souls. They stood out to varying degrees, like loose ends or fibres that had not quite caught a dye. With a little Hyemi still in them, they swayed when she tugged on the net; she tried to picture the result as nostalgia, the borderlanders dreaming of a different time. There, gaping in the feel of her mind, was the scar of Samaren’s uprooted soul. The bright thread between them, him and her, resonated with the power flowing through it. But she could go no further up that stream than the place where their souls had been grafted together by Festus Detrich’s unimaginable art. Even twenty years an exile, all of his belonging still flowed back to his own war-torn Ilyiga.

And there, something else. Something she could not place, though she sensed it clear enough. She sensed that it shied away as she wove her net and shifted uncomfortably at every pull.

She pulled harder.

She surfaced for a moment, just to get her bearings, to make sure she could do so swiftly if there was need. Samaren seemed to sense her stir – she found him keeping a thin fog all about them, likely to feel for any pursuers or more mundane trackers – and turned to look back. He raised an arm, pointing to the jagged horizon ahead.

She looked. There was the bear, not a speck now but a definite stain. Closer, closer.

“This way, I think,” Samaren said when next she came to. He had called a stop to let them swap horses, and now stood looking up, studying the lay of the land ahead. They were near the peak at last, and something like a path crawled along its steeply sloping rise. If she craned her neck hard, Amika could see the signal tower at the end of that questionable road, stark against a sky where the zenith of a meagre winter noon was just beginning to wane. Samaren was looking between the path and the horses, arms crossed, contemplating both with a look of interest edged with anticipation.

Amika had never quite liked steep paths, and she did not like his look. “Is there no safer way?”

“Safer, perhaps. But not faster. We will not make the tower today by another path.” She saw his point, but she also saw the vicious curl of that road and thought queasily of her horse climbing high with her fastened to it and deep in the world of souls besides. Samaren waited, but when she did not rally, said: “You know the faith of my Centre, Doma Amika.”

“I know it well.”  _ Fortune favours the bold _ .

“Then will you trust my good fortune?”

She looked from the mountain path to him, startled, but less than she might have imagined she would be. The question, the offer, was simple. He said it plainly, as though not giving it second thought.

She imagined that he didn’t. That was the nature of his faith and his Centre, and what he offered to her.

“I will,” she said. “Lead on, Captain Samaren.”

How the four of them – two weary horses, a somewhat worse-for-wear native of a land of gentle hills, and a young Land’s Own in a deep trance exploring the edge of her power – made it to the top, Amika never knew. All while they were climbing she hauled the fish in her net, closer, closer. When Samaren’s luck had delivered them to the peak, when the horses stopped not twenty yards away from the squat signal tower, she was not surprised to find their hunter waiting for them.

The man and his bear. The bear and its man. They looked much alike. The Guardian who shaped his power into the beast was not quite as tall as the farmer Esak had been, but stockier, barrel-chested, what little of his face she saw covered in pale hair. His spirit perched behind him, easily three meters of animal muscle painted in the fine iridescence of soul-power. The bear had hungry eyes. The man had hungry eyes and a levelled gun.

“Good day, fro,” Amika said coolly. “You will not do something foolish, I hope.”

Next to her, Samaren hopped off his horse and unwound his chain-whip. Both gestures were easy and precise with renewed energy, and put him just between her and that gleaming, frosted barrel.

The man saw it. His hooded eyes flashed hate. She realized that he understood his position exactly.

“How did you do it, you little bitch?” he growled. “How can you disrupt my power?”

“I do not see that you merit an explanation. Step aside. You are aware, I think, that my captain here would be thrilled to do me this particular service.”

The Bear Guardian spat. “Exile, I should have finished you when you were dying of a cold.”

“You should have, domé,” Samaren answered gleefully. “Now you’re rather out of luck.”

“We’ll see. We’ll see…” He moved the gun slowly, trying to centre it back on Amika. Samaren moved with him, step by step, swinging his weapon into a spin that whistled hunger. “I wanted her alive,” the man said.

The bear and the bullet both exploded forward with terrifying speed. But Samaren was faster, and Amika had known he would be. His chain-whip was already wrapped around the barrel of the gun, snatching it out of the man’s hands to throw the shot wide. Amika dismounted in a flash and kicked her terrified horse into the bear’s path, just as Samaren pulled the gun out of the man’s hands and sent it flying into the spirit’s face. There was no killing a spirit, but startling it was good enough. She slipped past the combatants and ran.   

The snow was torture to run through. But it was only twenty yards. Then she was clinging to the icy rungs of the ladder up to the signal tower. Behind her she heard roars and curses as Samaren kept both man and spirit at bay, pulling both again and again from giving chase. As she climbed the sky darkened, the air filling with the smell of coming thunder. The Fiend of No Nation was calling his storm, not for ambush or spycraft, but to battle.

Twice she nearly slipped. Twice more she fell heavily onto the planks that made up the middle platforms of the tower. As she pulled herself up to the top platform, there was a shout from below. Kneeling on the frozen wood, she glanced back over the edge to see the Bear Guardian grab hold of the first rung. 

That instant, the lightning broke.

It struck a pace away from him, close enough to fling him down in a terrified shock but not to kill outright. Samaren could be precise with his greatest weapon, but he could only pull nature so far out of its own way where its ordinary course pulled to strike the jutting tower. He had not taken that risk. And concentrating even that much had cost him. From above she saw the bear force him down into the snow, crushing and burying. Frost was creeping across its fur as the storm battered it, and the stunned Bear Guardian lay pouring all his focus and might into his spirit. She did not know which power would be faster, stronger, which would earn its wielder’s life.

Ignored for the moment, Amika turned away. The signal tower was in perfect order with fuel, oil and tinder, beacons ready to be lit. Somewhere across the borderland, someone would be watching. Hyem would be watching. One beacon for attack from the Schervon Northwest, two from the Adalan East. She prepared to lit three.

Her hands trembled in the cold of the peak.  _ War is coming _ . She splashed much too much of the oil supply on the first beacon, but reasoned that now was not the time to think of the long term.  _ Schervo is our enemy now.  _ The second fire leapt to life with vigour that almost singed her face.  _ My generals, my Kaiser, see me. I’m alive. I am doing a Guardian’s duty.  _ As the third signal flared she heard the spirit bear roar, a roar beyond anything natural. And under it, Samaren was shouting out, as loud as his strained lungs would let him - 

“ _ Amika! _ ”

She looked down and she saw it. The bear, almost a statue of ice, had all four paws sunk into the snow. The roar made the mountainside tremble. Layers of condensed powder cracked, and layers of ice beneath them. In less than a heartbeat, the avalanche would collapse the peak from under them all.

_ No _ .

This land was not Hyem, but she had plunged her roots into it. It remembered her, and it would obey. Without thinking, without caring what Ranna Vandavern would feel from away and across the border, she reached in, and she  _ held _ .

It was too late to mend the broken mountain, but the avalanche held its breath. She forced it to stillness as the beacons burned, as man and bear below scrambled away from the shaken ground about to come loose. Held it as she saw Samaren rush to climb the tower, as she felt, as though from outside her own body, that he got hold of her to take her back down. And, piercing through into the borderland as deep as she knew she would ever go, she saw something else just as her grip finally slipped.

The avalanche exploded out of her hands. The mountainside fell to bellowing pieces. 

With one arm tight about her, with a snarl of rage and relish, Samaren hurled them both off the top platform. They landed just clear of the path of ruin, on the hideous edge of the jagged scrape where snow and ice and rock had been torn like a cut through the mountain’s skin. The tower shook, tipped, and collapsed in an explosion of fire, so much like the one that had taken the Kaiser’s Bridge. Shattered shards blazed in the air, streaked the snow with ash and burning oil that would not be put out, and down the whole shrieking mass went, down with the broken earth, roaring down the slope in a hell of tumbling flames and ice.    
  


But all that was nothing to Amika as Samaren set her back down on her feet, even as he kept a hand on her arm, half for her balance and half for his. She stared at the Bear Guardian across the ruin of the peak. Even the thought of the beacons, whether they had stood long enough, was far away.

“ _ What are you? _ ” she asked in horror. “You are not Schervon or Hyemi. I felt your roots. You’re Anchored  _ here _ .”

The man was mad-eyed and bloody. He held up a fist. “I am a mountain man. A mountain man of the Eisenhorn. This is my land and I am its Guardian.”

The answer was a blow to every part of her body, from her dizzy head to her frozen feet. _Not Schervon. Not Ranna’s man._ No one’s man now – but he had been Hyemi. “You wish to be… the Eisenhorn’s Land’s Own?”

“No wishing. I  _ will _ be. Why Schervo and not here?!” He began to plow forward, his tattered bear shadowing him. “Who are you or Vandavern to call our fate? Hyem forgot us, twenty years while Detrich was fighting his wars in the East. To Schervo we’re nothing but a buffer! No more! The people are with me, Adalas has armed me – “

He got no further than that. With the name of her enemy in her ears, she had her thread of power at last, that she had looked for in vain when she thought it would lead across the border. She clenched it in the fist of her soul. Like a windpipe.

“You will bring another war,” she said, cold, distant as the spirit bear flickered, as the man writhed in her grasp, scrabbling at the air, at power he could not fight or see. “You will have us fight Adalas again. And Schervo too, now, at your bidding. For your borderland. And who then? Who next? Who after? No. No, it ends here.”

She closed her fist. Something inside it snapped.

The man did not collapse at once, testament to the strength of his Centre. But the colour was starting to flow out of the spirit as he looked back to it, wildly, as he reached for it as though he could cup the draining soul-power in his bodily hand. Amika turned around. But in her mind’s eye she could see them, the splinters of his Anchor, the living ends of his pulled roots squirming, spurting in the blind agony of unspeakable violation. Man and spirit both howled in the final strength of madness and hurled themselves towards her, but Samaren was there already, meeting the challenge of that frenzy with delight. She did not look back to see his inevitable victory. Really he was just the undertaker; she had done the killing already.

 

~**~

 

On the road back down to the Eisenhorn pass, Amika stared across the barren snow and contemplated war.

It was beyond question now; the beacons had been lit. She had lit all three with her own hands. Whatever move Adalas had planned to coincide with the borderland Guardian’s attack, Hyem had been warned of it. But it had been warned of Schervo as well, and Schervo was blameless. Implicated by deception –  _ no, by my own assumptions _ . She could not cover herself with the lie as she had with the sheepskin cover. All she had ever had of Schervo, of Ranna her sister-Guardian, was her own and her people’s mistrust.

Ander Kirschen and Gustav Basholme were at the border. Two of Hyem’s greatest, fiercest generals, who had felt the loss of Schervo keenly along with their brother-in-arms Festus Detrich. In their rage, they might do – but no – that was a lie as well. It was Ranna herself who had most cause to rage now. What might she have felt when Amika had torn into the borderland to uproot its Guardian?

What had the borderlanders felt, the people he had said were with him? What had  _ he _ felt - dying with no roots to take up his soul? 

_ Detrich would have done the same _ . She had no doubt of that, at least. Gathered his generals, ignored the Kaiser’s hesitance, marched into the borderland – alone if he must – and done as he willed with it and its people. And he would not have needed Saul Samaren at his side to guide him and fight on his behalf. He would have shot Ranna Vandavern down himself had he faced her. And there would have been war. And he would have been pleased.

All the same, except that she was not pleased but horrified. _Here, then,_ _the new Hyem!_

She could not identify the sound that she heard herself make, if it was a laugh, or a sob, or an outcry. Nothing but flat snow all around them. The tower was destroyed along with any hope of sending another message. She could not bear the thought of reaching into the borderland again to attempt anything more with her power. How would it welcome her, now that she had betrayed it so? It was almost dark, but what was there to do but ride on, ride on…

With a start, she realized that Samaren had ridden up beside her, had reached out to grab her reins and stop them both. She speared him with her look. “What do you want, Captain?”

“It’s nearly nighttime. We should stop.”

“Stop?”

“There is a cave for us to camp in nearby. And if I don’t have shelter and a fire soon, all the rest you’d ordered me to take will be for nothing.” He spoke through teeth gritted hard to stop their chattering. The bear had scarcely bloodied him, but had reduced his coat and gear to tatters; the buoying delight of the kill was fading before the day’s exhaustion, his lingering illness. He made no effort to hide as much, and how she resented that now. “Wherever we go, we’ll go in the morning.”

“We go to Hyem. We must return to Hyem before it all begins.”

“Doma, even if we ride day and night, Hyem is much too far for us to make a difference.”

Driven by an instinct like madness, she yanked the reins back from his hands and made to strike her mount with them to spur it on. But as the horse jumped and stumbled, so did her heart. It was a simple fact that could not be undone.  _ Hyem is too far away _ .

The cave was small and shallow, just enough to be free of snow and allow them a campfire. Samaren built the fire in a sloppy haste and sat to shiver beside it, so close that sparks singed his hair. But all Amika found herself able to do was pace the narrow cave mouth, back and forth, here and again. Caged, eating up yards that were no replacement for the miles between her and her homeland. The bone-thirst of separation pulsed unbearably, swirled with helplessness, with nauseous, raking guilt.

He glared up at her, foul-tempered in his discomfort. “Sit down, you’re driving me mad.”

“You were always mad.”

“Even so.”

“There will be war now. On two fronts. I imagine you must be pleased. Perhaps the Kaiser will lead on the Adalan front himself. General Kirschen will no doubt make me order your unit to take and hold the pass until supply lines can be established. At last Hyem will have some good use for you. After fifteen months training soldiers and policing peaceful borders. You must be pleased. You must be aching for it.”

“Yes,” Samaren said simply.

She whirled on him, blazing in all her power, ready with all she had in her to crash against and press and shatter him, for his pleasure, his madness, his service, for being her man and her weapon and leading her here to where at last she had to draw and use him. But it all came to pieces as the greatest of lies. He had done nothing but honour his oath. Every cold decision, desperate measure, cruel necessity, every death he had dealt had been in her name.

She came to her knees, fists clutched in her hair. “I shouldn’t have come, I shouldn’t have come…!”

How long she stayed there, she did not know. Samaren never rose from the fire. He sat in silence as she shook, as she gathered herself, pulled herself up, and finally joined him near the flames, schooling her breath to a cracked, brittle calm. Only then did his eyes turn to her face. His gaze was without pity and without judgement, but not unreadable. He was waiting. Waiting for her to speak.

“I was meant to be the new Hyem,” she said into his silence. “For twenty years we were the warlike land that Festus Detrich had willed. The land that he had made you and me for. But you killed him. And I replaced him.”

Samaren shrugged. “I never understood this new Hyem of yours.”

“A peaceful land. It was meant to be a peaceful land.”

“By the hand of a peaceful Land’s Own?”

“No – ” Here it was, the question. “If I had not come here, if I had not intervened – had not done as he would have, just as he would have, if I had truly let go of the power he had claimed – tell me, Captain, would any of this have happened?”

No immediate answer. He sat considering for a while. The shivers had calmed by now, and he could sit back a little, turn his hands to running over his torn coat as he thought; idly he pulled up the sheepskin cover and looked from it to the coat, considering them both. A practical consideration, turned, for once, to what he might use and mend.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “The trap was set. Perhaps Adalas would not have moved had it not been sprung, and perhaps it would have been content with me, or with Kirschen or some other key general. No other than you or I could have dealt with that borderland Guardian, but with no Adalan backing, the Eisenhorn can never become its own country. Perhaps you would have sent me against him and his at some later time, and then I would have killed many more than ten men. What’s the use? This is what happened.”

“It could have happened another way.”

“Could it have?”

“If I had not made Detrich’s mistakes – “

“What mistakes? Nothing you’ve done here would have been a mistake to his mind.”

It was a strange shock to realize how his remark echoed her own thoughts.  _ Festus Detrich would have been pleased.  _ Could it have happened another way? What were her mistakes?  _ Is it intervention? Is it power?  _ The cave was lit by flames, and yet she felt herself stare into darkness.  _ What is the new Hyem? Have I ever understood it myself? _

“You said that war will never end while there are men like you.” She stared into the campfire. “Detrich was such a man, and he died; but now I have made war as surely as he would have. My suspicion, my stubbornness, my rage… is it men like you, or women like me?”

Samaren raised his hands to the flames. He glanced at her, eyes full of their flickering. “You are only human, doma.”

_ And so are you.  _ He had said it a hundred times, and only now did she understand. 

“I have been so sure of this change,” she whispered. “All Hyem had been. I would not be him, and all else would simply follow. They have raised me up for this purpose, and so how could I do it wrong – but war is all we have known, for twenty years, and war is still coming. Is this why you love war? Because it is so much greater than even the greatest of us?”

“No. The opposite. In war  _ I  _ am the greatest. The storm goes where I will.” He put another piece of wood into the fire and leaned back into his bedroll. “Watch outside, not the fire, doma. I can only advise you on how to survive. I need sleep to chase off the last of this little cold, but wake me when you decide where we go. I will follow.”

He turned over and was asleep before she could protest, a lifelong soldier’s skill, and his snoring was altogether human. But Amika still found her gaze turned to the fire, imagining the storm following in her wake.

 

~**~

 

Soon after dawn, when the sky had just cleared from featureless black to a pale, anticipant grey, she woke him with a gentle shake.

He did not instantly snap to attention as she thought he might. His hand went straight to the gun by his bedroll, but he sat up slowly and looked to her. “Are we going to Hyem?”

“No,” she said. “We are going to Schervo.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At last, the border.

Ranna Vanvadern waited for them just as Amika had expected, on the crest of the ridge where the two of them had placed the bordermark. Beyond this point, the Eisenhorn gentled, sloped easily down to Schervo and the fertile plains of its windward side. The borderland ended, and what once had been Hyem became again someplace new. She was alone on the crest, on a small plain horse to go with her small plain form, a rifle slung across her back. For the first time since their very first meeting, Amika knew that she did not eclipse Schervo’s Land’s Own, the washerwoman’s daughter, in appearance or dress. Not after almost a week of harsh travel. She counted it as good.

Ranna rode up to the very stone of the mark and slid off her horse just behind it, planted her feet firmly on the ground that spoke to her and fed her roots. Amika quickly followed in dismounting, glad that Samaren did the same without her having to command him, and placed herself a handful of steps back from that same cold stone. But neither her swiftness nor her retreat altered Ranna’s scowl. They looked at each other across the invisible line that war had painted in oceans of blood, that peace had tried to cross with some paltry rails of iron. 

“What are you here for, Frowe Stattenholme?” Ranna snapped. 

Amika breathed in. No curtsying here, no disarming smiles, and no press of soul-power. This could only be a talk between equals. 

“I have made a mistake, Frowe Vandavern,” she answered. “I am here to amend it.”

Ranna did not retreat a step, but looked surprised, trying to pass it off as suspicion. Her gaze flicked back and forth between Amika and Samaren. “And  _ him _ ?”

“Captain Samaren has been my guide and protector on this journey.”

“He isn’t welcome here.”

“Neither of us mean to trespass.”

“You already have,” Ranna said flatly.

Amika took another breath, and a step forward.

“Land’s Own,” she said. “I know that you were informed of the destruction of the railhead. Kaiser Franz has had your answer to his telegram, and the truth is that he found the matter of little interest. But his generals were worried, and so was I. We suspected Adalas of foul play – “

“Spare me, Land’s Own. I know how well you lot all trust me. Your beacons were lit and I know what that means.”

“Do you think I came here to make war?”

Ranna spat on the snow. “Festus Detrich would have.”

“I came to show you that I am not Festus Detrich.”

Schervo’s Land’s Own studied her, eyes as cold as the Eisenhorn winter. Eyes in a face almost her own age, but so much older, so much more knowing, so much wearier. Ranna too had known war for so long. All the years of Detrich’s rule, bleeding Schervo for its men and its bread for his endless campaigns on a far border, and all the years building for the revolution that had freed her people of it.  _ Rot Hyem,  _ dead farmer Esak had said, _ it does nothing but take.  _

And Ranna would not act on the borderland, but she had a rifle. And a step behind her own back, Amika knew, Samaren still had his to hand, and his power besides. She felt his eyes on her. One shot, one strike; everything could end here. 

_ If it could have happened another way… but I have taken enough _ . 

“Sister-Guardian, please, see me.” She raised both hands, palms up, held them before her. Open, as she had opened to the borderland. It had been a kind of power, opening, and might have been a gentle one. It was its use that decided. “See  _ me _ , not him. He might have come to harm you here, at such a time. I have come to show that I will not.” She saw Ranna listen, waiting, uncertain, saw Schervo’s Land’s Own aching in her own wary way. Yes, Ranna had known war. But unlike Detrich, unlike Samaren and all men in their mould, it had made her ache for peace.

“Why the beacons?” Ranna asked, guarded, but an honest question.

“The warning about Adalas is in earnest. They have sent aid to separatists in the Eisenhorn region in hopes of removing me from the scene. These men have destroyed the Kaiser’s Bridge and have hunted me across the borderland.” Ranna’s response was the expected look of shock and outrage at both unthinkable actions. Encouraged, Amika pushed on. “A Guardian anchored in the borderland was acting as their ringleader. Before we confronted him and found out what he was, we had thought that he was your man.”

“Mine!” The outrage turned squarely on Amika then, and in its wake, a flame of true rage. “You thought I’d turned! Damn you, Amika, we were building a railway!”

“I know,” Amika said softly.  _ I will not forget again _ .

“And so you worked your power on the borderland? To separate him from me?”

“When I thought you both my enemies. Yes.”

“That isn’t unreasonable. I’d have done it myself.”

“You understand.”

“But that wasn’t all you did.” A strange look came into Ranna’s eye. She glanced past Amika at Samaren again, but evidently found no answer there, because her gaze returned and settled, heavy. “What else did you do? Where is he now?”

A third breath would not penetrate Amika’s suddenly tight throat. She commanded herself not to shiver. “He is dead.”

“No.”

“He is - ”

“What  _ else _ did you do?”

“I uprooted him.”

Ranna’s eyes widened. She did not recoil, but Amika could see the horror colour her scrutiny, sharpen it to a knife’s edge. And Amika bowed her head and did not shy from the blade.  _ See me,  _ she had said. 

She only looked up when she saw Ranna’s gaze move past her, going to Samaren again. Searching his unreadable face for much too easy an answer.  _ Do you picture him at my side, goading me to the unspeakable - as I have pictured him at yours, doing the same _ ? They could not move on from what they would not claim. “Captain Samaren had had no say in it, Frowe Vandavern. The decision was mine… just as killing Festus Detrich had been yours.” 

She saw the words go through, not so much an arrow into Ranna as a lancet. Opening something, draining something, there in the tension between them. Ranna’s eyes lost their terrible edge, clouded in reflection.

“Were you afraid?” she asked.

Amika swallowed, nodded minutely. “That was a part of it.”

“And desperate.”

“And furious. And the power to stop it was all in my hand. And it was this - or war.” 

“Yes.” Schervo’s Land’s Own glanced down at her own hands, glanced up again. Her short frame drew straighter, her head lifted so that their gazes were level, eye holding eye. “So now  _ you _ see  _ me. _ ”

Silence stretched across the ridge. Amika felt it settle within her. Not peace yet, but silence, a stilling of her heart, a settling of teetering weights and burdens. Balance, at least. Much that was heavy could be carried, while there was balance.

“You probably are right, about Adalas,” Ranna mused at length, while she was finding again the ground beneath her feet. “Easier to deal with that as allies. The borderland too.”

“If you would permit us to cross, I shall be able to send a telegram to the Kaiser,” Amika said quietly. “I will stop any action, and broker alliance, if you permit it - and see the railway rebuilt.”

“Would he listen to you?”

“He would have listened to Festus Detrich. And I have Detrich’s power.” Power to do wrong; power to set right.

At length, Ranna nodded.

Amika was just beginning to breathe again, breathe for the sake of life and not in the employ of control, when Samaren spoke up. He surprised them both equally, in the fact of speaking, but also in his tone. Not uncertain, exactly; but probing, slow as a man approaching a vast unknown would be slow, step by step. “Doma Vandavern, I should like to say – I do not regret your brother’s death. But I know that it had pained you. And that was not my intent, then or now.”

Ranna gave a shaky snort. “Is that an apology, Fiend of No Nation?”

“No. But I do… understand. For what that is worth to you. I would take that back, if I could. The pain, if not the deed.”

Ranna looked at Amika, who could only look back just as baffled. But something about her gaze was strangely moved. She inclined her head to Samaren; he did the same. Then she turned back to her horse, mounted in one hurried, decisive movement. She turned it so that she could gesture past the bordermark, a broad gesture toward her own land.

“Come,” she said. “Let’s get you both out of the cold.”

 

~**~

 

In essence, Amika found, one military camp was much like another, regardless of such trivialities as national affiliation. The Schervon camp, though much smaller and more haphazard than the Hyemi, had the advantage of sitting in the midst of the small country’s most fertile region, and even in winter enjoyed certain luxuries to that effect. There were few pleasures in the world greater than a clean dress – Great Sun, but she had loathed dressing like a soldier – and a real bed. Schervo had little to offer yet, in the second winter of its independence, but it offered with open hands, even as it was offering to the Land’s Own of Hyem. Or perhaps it was that after an ordeal, every kindness felt the greater.

It was strange, being among these people, upon this soil. She knew that they remembered her, had not known what to expect from that. The greatest relief had been in finding that they did not quite know, either. Ranna’s men called her princess, as Hyem once had when princess-consort was all she had hoped, wanted, and could expect to ever be. To them, of all people, the new Hyem was still a simple thing – the young, sweet, long-beloved princess-consort as the symbol of a bright future to come.

It didn’t fool her, but for a little while it let her rest.

She had expected to have to drag Samaren by his ear to the camp surgeon. But he went uncomplaining, and laughed himself sore when the woman declared that only great good fortune had saved him from lung-rot. After that she sent him to bed in the little house where they had been installed, as a handy excuse to keep him away from Ranna’s officers. Returning there on the eve of their second day in Schervo, she found him reclining in that bed like a king. He had a Schervon pastry in one hand and a book on military mapmaking in the other, both without a doubt filched, and moved little if at all to see her enter. 

Amika pursed her lips despite the upward quirk of one corner. “The letter of the surgeon’s orders, I see.” If not for the handkerchief he still kept to hand, she might never have guessed he’d been ill.

He shrugged, but did offer her the pastry. “I take surgeons seriously. And this is a much better cure than horse blood.”

She had to concede the point, and the pastry was rich with cream and honey. She settled on the edge of the bed to eat it, wryly gratified that he at least pulled up his feet to make room.

“The Kaiser, and Ander Kirschen, send their compliments on our good work in the Eisenhorn. You may be promoted, Captain.”

“May I really?”

“No. But Franz’s message confessed that he was glad to hear you were alive, before it became clear that war was averted after all.” She saw his wolflike grin, and was not displeased to wipe it from his face with the news that followed. “Ranna has taken his apology graciously. And it transpires that Lord Rittner has also telegraphed Franz to apologise for the unthinkable actions of some splinter group within his government. Quite the conspiracy. Heads may roll. But not on the battlefield, I regret to inform you.” Davy Linde, too, had sent a telegram, this one for her alone.  _ I have made my position on this known to Rittner and to parliament. Our people are both equally weary; I will send no Guardians of mine to die by Saul Samaren’s blade. There will be no war. Thank you, sister-Guardian. _

Samaren grunted at that in open disappointment. “If this peace of yours lasts, doma, I’ll lose my edge growing idle and fat.”

“Would you not simply leave for bloodier fields?”

He gave her a suddenly sharp look, eyebrows raised, the gleam in his eye old and familiar. “It will not last that long.”

The taste of cream and honey soured in her mouth. She put the pastry down, her stomach quietly twisting. He did the same with his book, closing it on a folded page. Military mapmaking; she knew the author’s name, a nobleman with an estate. Fifteen months ago, it had been in Hyem. Now it was in Schervo.

_ It will not last that long _ . On her clean dress, on the real bed, she saw the blood of the borderland farmer-soldiers, the twisted, pulled roots of the Bear Guardian.  _ Who then? Who next? _

“You have sworn an oath,” she said quietly.

“So I have,” he answered, as quiet.

“Would you fight the borderlanders for me?” 

“Need you ask?”

“And Schervo? Adalas?”

“By your will.”

“And if I order that you shall not fight? If my will is that you shall never fight again?”

_ Then I disobey _ . She could all but hear him already, speaking without even a second glance her way. But the well-known words were not forthcoming. Instead Samaren met her eyes. No challenge in them now, no testing measure.  _ See me _ , she had said, and he did. 

“Some might have ordered it,” he said. “But you – I do not think you will.”

Amika swallowed past the twist in her gut. In her hand, her flesh and blood hand, she seemed to sense again something snapping in half, something like a windpipe.  _ You are only human, doma,  _ he had said. Her man, or her monster. But hers, this way or that.

“Captain Samaren,” she said softly, “the oath you swore…” Its well-remembered words were in her mind, clear in the dust of after the battle, over the grave of the first man she had asked him to kill.  _ I cannot defeat you, but you coming to me is the sweetest victory of all. On my Centre and my god, I swear it, I will be the weapon you need.  _ “What did truly it mean?”

Samaren inclined his head to her. A salute, a subtle bow.

“You know, Doma Amika,” he said. And she did.

She turned away from him, turned to look East, beyond the mountains and towards home.

 

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> If you've enjoyed the story and want more of the world/characters, [I got you covered.](https://guardiansverse.dreamwidth.org/)


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